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' A fierce battle 
the tree-tops " 



LITTLE BROTHER TO THE BEAR 

AND OTHER ANIMAL 

STUDIES 



WILLIAM J. LONG 



WOOD FOLK SERIES 
BOOK FIVE 



GINN & COMPANY 

BOSTON • NEW YORK . CHICAGO • LONDON 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Copies rfeceivea 

DEC 6 lyiM 

^Xouyntfiu tniry 

OCISS £C XXc. Noi 

COPY £. 



11 ' 

,83 



Entered at Stationers' Hall 



Copyright, 1903, 1904,. 
By WILLIAM J. LONG 



ALL rights reserved 



Cl)c SUbcncTttm JDrcfid 

GINN & COM PANY- CAM- 
BRIDGE- MASSACHUSETTS 



PREFACE 

'nr^HE object of this little book, so far as it has an 
-*■ object beyond that of sharing a simple pleasure of 
mine with others, will be found in the eleventh chapter, 
entitled "The Point of View." The title will be explained 
in the first chapter on "A Little Brother to the Bear." 

All the sketches here are reproduced from my own note- 
books largely, or from my own memory, and the observa- 
tions cover a period of some thirty years, — from the time 
when I first began to prowl about the home woods with a 
child's wonder and delight to my last hard winter trip into 
the Canadian wilderness. Some of the chapters, like those 
of the Woodcock and the Coon, represent the characteris- 
tics of scores of animals and birds of the same species ; 
others, like those of the Bear and Eider-Duck in "Animal 
Surgery," represent the acute intelligence of certain individ- 
ual animals that nature seems to have lifted enormously 
above the level of their fellows ; and in a single case — that 
of the Toad — I have, for the story's sake, gathered into one 
creature the habits of four or five of these humble little 



iv Preface 

helpers of ours that I have watched at different times and in 
different places. 

The queer names herein used for beasts and birds are 
those given by the Milicete Indians, and represent usually 
some sound or suggestion of the creatures themselves. 
Except where it is plainly stated otherwise, all the incidents 
and observations have passed under my own eyes and have 
been confirmed later by other observers. In the records, 
while holding closely to the facts, I have simply tried to 
make all these animals as interesting to the reader as they 
were to me when I discovered them. 

WILLIAM J. LONG. 
Stamford, Conn., March, 1903. 



CONTENTS 



A Little Brother to the Bear 

Whitooweek the Hermit 

A Woodcock Genius 

When Upweekis goes hunting 

K'dunk the Fat One 

Mooween's Den 

Kingfisher's Kindergarten . 

Pekompf's Cunning . 

Animal Surgery 

Hunting without a Gun 

The Point of View 



Glossary of Indian Names 



Page 
3 

30 
60 

64 

75 
100 
108 
116 
132 
146 
170 

177 




^immp 



M, 




EW knew the way to the little house in the rocks 
where the Little Brother to the Bear lived. It was 
miles away from every other house but one, in the 
heart of the big still woods. You had to leave the 
highway where it dipped into a cool dark hollow 
among the pines, and follow a lonely old road that the 
wood-choppers sometimes used in winter, and that led 
you, if you followed it far enough, to a tumble-down 
old mill on another cross-road, where the brook chat- 
tered and laughed all day long at the rusty wheel, and 
the phcebe built unmolested under the sagging beams,, 
and you could sometimes hear a trout jumping among 
the foam bubbles in the twilight. But you did not go 
so far if you wanted to find where the Little Brother 
to the Bear lived. 

3 



4 A Little Brother to the Bear 

As you followed the wood road you came suddenly 
to a little clearing, with a brook and a wild meadow 
and a ledge all covered with ferns. The road twisted 
about here, as a road always does in going by a pretty 
place, as if it were turning back for another look. 
There was a little old house under the ledge wherein 
some shy, silent children lived ; and this was the only 
dwelling of man on the three-mile road. 

Just beyond, at a point where the underbrush was 
thickest, an unnoticed cart path stole away from the 
wood road and brought you to a little pond in the 
woods, at the spot where, centuries ago, the beavers 
had made a dam and a deep place for stowing their 
winter's wood. If you took a long pole and prodded 
deep in the mud here, you would sometimes find a 
stick of the beaver's food-wood, its conical ends show- 
ing the strong tooth marks plainly, its bark still fresh 
and waiting to be eaten when the little owner should 
come back again ; for that is what he cut it and put it 
there for, untold years ago. 

Very few ever thought of this, however; those 
who came to the spot had all their thoughts for the 
bullpouts that swarmed in the beaver's old storehouse 
and that would bite well on dark days. There were 
ledges all about the ancient dam and on both sides 
of the woodsy valley below; and among the mossy, 



A Little Brother to the Bear 5 

fern-covered rocks of these ledges one of the shy 
children, with whom I had made friends, pointed out 
an arched doorway made by two great stones leaning 
against each other. 

" Thome animal livth in there. I theen him. I 
peeked, one day, an' I theen hith eyeth wink ; an', an', 
an' then I ran away," he said, his own eyes all round 
with the wonder of the woods. 

We made no noise, but lay down under a bush to- 
gether and watched the wonderful old doorway until 
it was time for the shy child to go home ; but nothing 
came out, nor even showed a shining inquisitive eye 
in the doorway behind the screen of hanging ferns. 
Still we knew something was in there, for I showed 
my little woodsman, to his great wonder and delight, a 
short gray hair tipped with black clinging to the rocks. 
Then we went away more cautiously than we came. 

" Maybe it 's a coon," I told the shy child, " for they 
are sleepyheads and snooze all day. Foxy, too ; they 
don't come out till dark, and they go in again before 
daylight, so that boys can't find out where they live." 

When the time of full moon came I went back to 
the little house among the ledges, one afternoon, and 
hid under the same bush to watch until something 
should come out. But first I looked all about, and found 
a huge hollow chestnut tree that the wood-choppers 



6 A Little Brother to the Bear 

had passed by for years as not worth the cutting. 
There were scratches and claw pits everywhere in the 
rough bark, and just under the lower limbs was a big 
dark knot hole that might be a doorway to a den. So 
I lay down in hiding where I could see both the tree 
and the fern-screened archway among the rocks by 
simply turning my head. 

At twilight there were sudden scratchings in the 
hollow tree, mounting higher and higher; then muffled 
grunts and whinings and expostulations, as if little voices 
inside the tree were saying: My turn first. No, mine ! 
E-e-e-e-ahh, get out ! The whinings stopped abruptly 
and a face appeared in the dark knot hole — a sharp, 
pointed face with alert ears and bright eyes that looked 
out keenly over the still woods where only shadows 
were creeping about and only a wild duck disturbed the 
silence, quacking softly to her brood in the little pond. 
Then the whining began again in the hollow tree, and 
four other little faces pushed their sharp noses into the 
knot hole, filling it completely, all watching and listen- 
ing, and wiggling their chins down on their fellows' 
heads so as to get a better view point, yet all eager as 
children to be out and at play after their long sleep. 

One impatient little fellow clawed his way upon his 
mother's back and thrust his face out between her 
ears, and then I had a chance to see it better — a 



A Little Brother to the Bear 7 

wonderful face, full of whims and drollery, with a white 
ring about its pointed muzzle, and a dark line running 
from the top of its nose and spreading into ebony rings 
around each eye, as if he were wearing queer smoked 
goggles, behind which the eyes twinkled and shone, 
or grew sober with much gravity as he heard the duck 
quacking. A keen face, yet very innocent, in which 
dog intelligence and fox cunning and bear drollery 
mingled perfectly ; a face full of surprises, that set you 
smiling and thinking at once ; a fascinating, inquisitive 
face, the most lovable and contradictious among the 
Wood Folk, — the face of Mooweesuk the coon, the 
Little Brother to the Bear, as Indian and naturalist 
unite in calling him. 

The mother came out first and sagged away back- 
wards down the tree, swinging her head from side to 
side to look down over her shoulder and see how far 
yet, in true bear fashion. The four little ones followed 
her, clawing and whining their way to the bottom — 
all but one, who when half-way down turned and 
jumped, landing on his mother's soft back to save 
himself trouble. Then she led the way to the door- 
way among the rocks, and the young followed in single 
file, winding about on her trail, stopping and sniffing 
when she did, and imitating her every action, just as 
young bear cubs do when roaming about the woods. 



8 A Little Brother to the Bear 

At the mouth of the den she stepped aside, and the 
young filed in out of sight, one after another. The 
mother looked and listened for a moment, then scuttled 
away through the woods as a clear tremulous whinny 
came floating in through the twilight. A moment 
later I saw her on the shore of the pond with a larger 
coon, her mate probably, who had been asleep in an- 
other hollow tree by himself; and the two went off 
along the shore frogging and fishing together. 

The mother had scarcely disappeared when the 
little ones came out of their den and began playing 
together, rolling and tumbling about like a litter of fox 
cubs, doing it for fun purely, yet exercising every claw 
and muscle for the hard work that a coon must do 
when he is called upon to take care of himself. After 
a time one of the cubs left his brothers playing and 
went back to the chestnut tree by the same way that 
he had come, following every turn and winding of the 
back trail as if there were a path there — as there 
probably was, to his eyes and nose, though mine could 
not find any. He climbed the tree, as if he were after 
something, and disappeared into the knot hole, where 
I could hear the little fellow whining and scratching 
his way down inside the tree. In a moment he reap- 
peared with something in his mouth. In the dusk I 
could not make out what it was, but as he came back 




"The little ones came out of their den 
and began playing together" 



A Little Brother to the Bear 9 

and passed within ten feet of where I was hiding I 
had my field-glasses upon him and saw it plainly — 
a little knot of wood with a crook in it, the solitary 
plaything which you will find, all smooth from much 
handling, in almost every house where the Little 
Brother to the Bear has lived. 

He carried it back to where the young coons were 
playing, lay down among them, and began to play by 
himself, passing the plaything back and forth through 
his wonderful front paws, striking it up, catching it, 
and rolling it around his neck and under his body, as a 
child does who has but one plaything. Some of the 
other coons joined him, and the little crooked knot 
went whirling back and forth between them, was 
rolled and caught, and hidden and found again, — all 
in silent intentness and with a pleasure that, even in 
the twilight, was unmistakable. 

In the midst of this quiet play there came a faint 
ripple and splash of water, and the little coons 
dropped their plaything and stood listening, eyes all 
bright behind their dark goggles, noses wiggling, and 
ears cocked at the plashing on the pond shore. The 
mother was there diligently sousing something that 
she had caught; and presently she appeared and the 
little ones forgot their play in the joy of eating. But 
it was too far away and the shadows were now too 



io A Little Brother to the Bear 

dark to see what it was that she had brought home, 
and how she divided it among them. When she went 
away again it had grown dark enough for safety, and 
the young followed her in single file to the pond shore, 
where I soon lost them among the cool shadows. 

That was the beginning of a long acquaintance, cul- 
tivated sometimes by day, more often by night ; some- 
times alone, when I would catch one of the family 
fishing or clamming or grubbing roots or nest robbing ; 
sometimes with a boy, who caught two of the family 
in his traps; and again with the hunters under the 
September moon, when some foxy old coon would 
gather a freebooter band about him and lead them 
out to a raid on the cornfields. There each coon 
turned himself promptly into an agent of destruction 
and, reveling in the unwonted abundance, would pull 
down and destroy like a little savage, and taste twenty 
milky ears of corn before he found one that suited him 
perfectly; and then, too full for play or for roaming 
about to find all the hollow trees in the woods, he 
would take himself off to the nearest good den and 
sleep till he was hungry again and the low whinny of 
the old leader called him out for another raid. 

Could we have followed the family on this first night 
of their wanderings, before the raids began and the 
dogs had scattered them, we should have understood 



A Little Brother to the Bear 1 1 

why Mooweesuk is called a brother to the bear. Run- 
ning he steps on his toes, like a dog; and anatomic- 
ally, especially in the development of the skull and ear 
bones, he suggests the prehistoric ancestor of both dog 
and wolf ; but otherwise he is a pocket-edition of Moo- 
ween in all his habits. The mother always leads, like 
a bear, and the little ones follow in single file, noting 
everything that the mother calls attention to. They 
sit on their haunches and walk flat-footed, like a bear, 
leaving a track from their hind feet like that of a dwarf 
baby. Everything eatable in the woods ministers to 
their hunger, as it does to that of the greedy prowler 
in the black coat Now they stir up an ant's nest ; 
now they grub into a rotten log for worms and beetles. 
If they can find sweet sap, or a bit of molasses in an 
old camp, they dip their paws in it and then lick them 
clean, as Mooween does. They hunt now for winter- 
green berries, and now for a woodmouse. They find 
a shallow place in the brook, when the suckers are 
running, and wait there till the big fish go" by, when 
they flip them out with their paws and scramble after 
them. From this fishing they turn to lush water-grass, 
or to digging frogs arid turtles out of the mud ; and 
the turtle's shell is cracked by dropping a stone upon 
it. Now they steal into the coop and scuttle away with 
a chicken ; and after eating it they come back to the 



1 2 A Little Brother to the Bear 

garden to crack a pumpkin open and make a dessert 
of the seeds. Now they see a muskrat swimming by 
in the pond with a mussel in his mouth, and they fol- 
low after him along the bank; for Musquash has a 
curious habit of eating in regular places — a flat rock, 
a stranded log, a certain tussock from which he has 
cut away the grass — and will often gather half a dozen 
or more clams and mussels before he sits down to dine. 
Mooweesuk watches till he finds the place ; then, while 
Musquash is gone away after more clams, he will run 
off with all that he finds on the dining table. 

A score of times, on the ponds and streams, I have 
read the record of this little comedy. You can always 
tell the place where Musquash eats by the pile of mus- 
sel shells in the water below it; and sometimes you 
will find Mooweesuk's track stealing down to the 
place, and if you follow it you will find where he 
cracked the clams that Musquash had gathered. 

There is another way in which Mooweesuk is curi- 
ously like a bear: he wanders very widely, but he has 
regular beats, like Mooween, and, if not disturbed, 
always comes back with more or less regularity to any 
place where you have once seen him, and comes by 
the same unseen path. Like Mooween, his knowledge 
of the woods is wide and accurate. He knows — 
partly by searching them out, and partly from his 



A Little Brother to the Bear 13 

mother, who takes him and shows him where they 
are — every den and hollow tree that will shelter a 
coon in times of trouble. He has always one den 
near a cornfield, where he can sleep when too full or 
too lazy to travel; he has one dry tree for stormy 
weather, and one cool mossy shell in deep shadow for 
the hot summer days. He has at least one sunny 
nook in the top of a hollow stub, where he loves to lie 
and soak in the fall sunshine ; and one favorite giant 
tree with the deepest and warmest hollow, which he 
invariably uses for his long winter sleep. And besides 
all these he has at least one tower of refuge near every 
path of his, to which he can betake himself when sud- 
den danger threatens from dogs or men. 

Though he walks and hunts and fights and feeds 
like a bear, Mooweesuk has many habits of his own 
that Mooween has never approached. One of these 
is his habit of nest robbing. Mooween does that, to 
be sure, for he is fond of eggs; but he must confine 
himself largely to ground-birds and to nests that he 
can reach by standing on his hind legs. Therefore 
are the woodpeckers all safe from him. Mooweesuk, 
on his part, can never see a hole in a tree without 
putting his nose into it to find out whether it contains 
any eggs or young woodpeckers. If it does contain 
them, he will reach a paw down, clinging close to the 



14 A Little Brother to the Bear 

tree and stretching and pushing his arm into the hole 
clear to his shoulder, to see if perchance the nest be 
not a foolishly shallow one and the eggs lie within 
reach of his paw — which suggests a monkey's, by the 
way, in its handlike flexibility. 

Once, on the edge of a wild orchard, I saw him rob 
a golden-winged woodpecker's nest in this way. The 
mother bird flew out as Mooweesuk came scratching 
up the tree, which assured him that he would find 
something worth while within. He stretched in a 
paw, caught ah egg and appeared to be rolling it up, 
holding it against the side of the tunnel. When the 
egg was almost up to the entrance he put in his nose 
to see the treasure. Then it slipped and fell back, 
and probably broke. He tried another, got it up 
safely, and ate it whole where he was. He tried a 
third, which slipped and broke like the first. At this, 
with the taste of fresh egg in his mouth, he seemed to 
grow impatient, or perhaps he got an idea from the 
yellow streaks on his claws. He jabbed his paw down 
hard so as to break all the eggs, and drew it up drip- 
ping. He licked it clean with his tongue and put it 
back again into the yellow mess at the bottom. This 
was easy, and he kept it up until his moist paw 
brought up only shells and rotten wood ; whereupon 
he backed away down the tree and shuffled off into 



A Little Brother to the Bear 15 

the woods, leaving a sad mess for a mother wood- 
pecker to face behind him. 

Another habit in which he has improved upon 
Mooween is his fishing. He knows how to flip fish 
out of water with his paw, as all bears do ; but he has 
also learned how to attract them when they are not to 
be found on the shallows. Many times in the twilight 
I have found Mooweesuk sitting very still on a rock 
or gray log beside the pond or river, his soft colors 
and his stillness making him seem like part of the 
shore. Other naturalists and hunters have mentioned 
the same thing, and their testimony generally agrees 
in this: that Mooweesuk's eyes are half shut at such 
times, and his sensitive feelers, or whiskers, are play- 
ing on the surface of the water. The fish below, see- 
ing this slight motion but not seeing the animal above, 
attracted either by curiosity or, more likely, by the 
thought of insects playing, rise to the surface and are 
snapped out by a sweep of Mooweesuk's paw. 

In a lecture, many years ago, Dr. Samuel Lock- 
wood, a famous naturalist, first called attention to this 
curious way of angling. Since then I have many 
times seen Mooweesuk at his fishing; but I have 
never been fortunate enough to see him catch any- 
thing, though I have seen a wildcat do the trick per- 
fectly in the same cunning way. Remembering his 



1 6 A Little Brother to the Bear 

fondness for fish, and the many places where I have 
seen that he has eaten them, where the water was 
plainly too deep to flip them out in the ordinary bear 
way, I have no doubt whatever that Dr. Lock wood 
has discovered the true secret of his patient waiting 
above the pools where the fish are feeding. 

There is another curious habit of the coon which 
distinguishes him from the bear and from all other 
animals. That is, his habit of washing, or rather of 
sousing, everything he catches in water. No matter 
what he finds to eat, — mice, chickens, roots, grubs, 
fruit, everything, in fact, but fish, — he will take it to 
water, if he be anywhere near a pond or brook, and 
souse it thoroughly before eating. Why he does this 
is largely a matter of guesswork. It is not to clean it, 
for much of it is already clean ; not to soften it, for clams 
are soft enough as they are, and his jaws are powerful 
enough to crush the hardest shells, yet he souses them 
just the same before eating. Possibly it is to give things 
the watery taste of fish, of which he is very fond ; more 
probably it is a relic, like the dog's turning around 
before he lies down, or like the unnecessary migration 
of most birds, the inheritance from some forgotten 
ancestor that had a reason for the habit, and that lived 
on the earth long, long years before there was any man 
to watch him or to wonder why he did it. 



A Little Brother to the Bear 17 

Deep in the wilderness Mooweesuk is shy and alert 
for danger, like most of the wild things there ; but if 
approached very quietly, or if he find you unexpect- 
edly near him, he is filled with the Wood Folk's 
curiosity to know who you are. Once, on the long 
tote-road from St. Leonards to the headwaters of the 
Restigouche, I saw Mooweesuk sitting on a rock by 
a trout brook diligently sousing something that he 
had just caught. I crept near on all fours to the edge 
of an old bridge, when the logs creaked under my 
weight and he looked up from his washing and saw 
me. He left his catch on the instant and came up 
the brook, part wading, part swimming, put his fore- 
paws on the low bridge, poked his head up over the 
edge, and looked at me steadily, his face within ten 
feet of mine. He disappeared after a few moments 
and I crawled to the edge of the bridge to see what it 
was that he was washing. A faint scratching made 
me turn round, and there he was, his paws up on the 
other edge of the bridge, looking back at the queer 
man-thing that he had never seen before. He had 
passed under the bridge to look at me from the other 
side, as a fox invariably does if you keep still enough. 
The game that he was washing was a big frog, and 
after a few moments he circled the bridge, grabbed his 
catch, and disappeared into the woods. 



1 8 A Little Brother to the Bear 

Near towns where he is much hunted Mooweesuk 
has grown wilder, like the fox, and learned a hundred 
tricks that formerly he knew nothing about. Yet 
even here, if found young, he shows a strange fearless- 
ness and even a rare confidence in man. Once, in the 
early summer, I found a young coon at the foot of a 
ledge, looking up at a shelf a few feet above his head 
and whimpering because he could not get up. It was 
a surprise to him, evidently, that his claws could not 
make the same impression on the hard rock that they 
did on the home tree in which he was born. He made 
no objection — indeed, he seemed to take it as the 
most natural thing in the world — when I picked him 
up and put him on the shelf that he was whimpering 
about ; but in a moment, like a baby, he wanted to get 
down again, and again I ministered to his necessities. 
When I went away he followed after me whimpering, 
forgetting his own den and his fellows in the ledge 
hard by, and was not satisfied till I took him up, when 
he curled down in the hollow of my arm and went to 
sleep perfectly contented. 

Presently he waked up, cocking his ears and twist- 
ing his head, dog fashion, at some sound that was too 
faint for my ears, and poked his inquisitive nose all 
over me, even putting it down inside my collar, where 
it felt like a bit of ice creeping about my neck. Not 



A Little Brother to the Bear 19 

till he had clawed his way inside my coat and put his 
nose in my vest pocket did he find the cause of the 
mysterious sounds which he heard. It was my watch 
ticking, and in a moment he had taken it out and was 
playing with the bright thing, as pleased as a child 
with a new plaything. He made a famous pet, full of 
tricks and drollery, catching chickens by pretending 
to be asleep when they came stretching their necks 
for the crumbs in his dish, playing possum when he 
was caught in mischief, drinking out of a bottle, full 
of joy when he could follow the boys to the woods, 
where he ran wild with delight but followed them 
home at twilight, and at last going off by himself to 
his home tree to sleep away the winter — but I must 
tell about all that elsewhere. 

Like the bear, Mooweesuk is a peaceable fellow and 
tends strictly to his own affairs as he wanders wide 
through the woods. This is not from fear, for no ani- 
mal, except perhaps the wolverine — who is a terrible 
beast — is more careless of danger or faces it with 
such coolness and courage when it appears. Of a dog 
or two he takes little heed. If he hear them on his 
trail, he generally climbs a tree to get out of the way ; 
for your dog, unlike his wild brother, the wolf, is a 
meddlesome fellow and must needs be worrying every- 
thing ; and Mooweesuk, like most other wild creatures, 



20 A Little Brother to the Bear 

loves peace, hunts only when hungry, and would always 
prefer to avoid a row if possible. When caught on the 
ground, or cornered, or roused to action by a sudden 
attack, he backs up against the nearest tree or stone 
to keep his enemies from getting at him from behind, 
and then rights till he is dead, or till none of his ene- 
mies are left to bother him, when he goes quietly on 
his way again. No matter how great the odds or how 
terribly he is punished, I have never seen a coon lose 
his nerve or turn his back to run away. If the dogs 
be many and he is near a pond or river, he will lead 
them into deep water, where he is at home, and then 
swimming rapidly in circles will close with them one 
by one and put them out of the fight most effectively. 
His method here seldom varies. He will whirl in 
suddenly on the dog that he has singled out, grip him 
about the neck with one arm, saw away at his head 
with his powerful teeth, at the same time slashing 
him across the eyes with his free claws, and then pile 
his weight on the dog's head to sink him under and 
drown all the rest of the fight out of him. That is 
generally enough for one dog ; and Mooweesuk, with- 
out a scratch and with his temper cool as ice, will 
whirl like a flash upon his next victim. 

Fortunately such troublous times are rare in Moo- 
weesuk' s life, and the wilderness coon knows little 



A Little Brother to the Bear 21 

about them. His life from beginning to end is gener- 
ally a peaceable one, full of good things to eat, and of 
sleep and play and a growing knowledge of the woods. 
He is born in the spring, a wee, blind, hairless little 
fellow, like a mole or a bear cub. As he grows he 
climbs to the entrance to his den, and will sit there as 
at a window for hours at a time, just his nose and eye 
visible, looking out on the new, bright, rustling world 
of woods, and blinking sleepily in the flickering sun- 
shine. Then come the long excursions with his mother, 
at first by day when savage beasts are quiet, then at 
twilight, and then at last the long night rambles, in 
which, following his leader, he learns a hundred things 
that a coon must know : to follow the same paths till 
he comprehends the woods; to poke his inquisitive 
nose into every crack and cranny, for the best morsels 
on his bill of fare hide themselves in such places; to 
sleep for a little nap when he is tired, resting on his 
forehead so as to hide his brightly marked face and 
make himself inconspicuous, like a rock or a lichen- 
covered stump; to leap down from the tallest tree 
without hurting himself; and when he uses a den in 
the earth or rocks, to have an exit some distance away 
from the entrance, and never under any circumstances 
to enter his den save by his front door. There is great 
wisdom in this last teaching. When a dog finds a 



22 A Little Brother to the Bear 

hole with a trail that always leads out of it he goes 
away, knowing it is of no use to bark there ; but when 
he finds an opening into which a trail is leading, he 
thinks of course that his game is inside, and proceeds 
to howl and to dig without ever a thought in his fool- 
ish head that there may be another way out. Mean- 
while, as he digs and raises an unpardonable row in 
the quiet woods, Mooweesuk will either wait just 
inside the entrance till she gets a chance to nip the 
dog's nose or crush his paw, or else will slip quietly 
out of the back door with her little ones and take them 
off to a hollow tree where they can sleep in peace and 
have no fear till the dog goes away. 

By the time the first snows blow the little coons are 
well grown and strong enough to take good care of 
themselves ; and then, like the bear again, they escape 
the cold and the hunger of winter by going to sleep for 
four or five months in a warm den that they have selected 
carefully during their summer wanderings. They are 
fat as butter when they curl themselves up for their long 
sleep ; their ringed tails cover their sensitive noses, and 
if they waken for a time they suck their paws drowsily 
till they sleep again; so that, like the bear, they are 
often tender-footed when they come out in the spring. 

Often the young coons of the same family sleep all 
together in the same den. The old males prefer to 



A Little Brother to the Bear 23 

den by themselves, and are easily found; but the mother 
coon, like the mother bear, takes infinite pains to hide 
herself away where she can bring forth her young in 
peace, and where no one will ever find them. 

There is one curious habit suggested by these winter 
dens that I have never seen explained, and for which 
I cannot account satisfactorily. On certain soft days 
in winter Mooweesuk wakes from his long sleep and 
wanders off into the world. At times you may follow 
his track for miles through the woods without finding 
that he goes anywhere or does anything in particular, 
for I have never found that he has eaten anything on 
these wanderings. Sometimes, miles away from his 
den, his track turns aside and goes straight to a hol- 
low tree where other coons are spending the winter. 
It may possibly be that they are his own family, who 
generally have a den of their own, and whom he visits 
to see if all is well. Sometimes from this den another 
coon goes out with him, and their tracks wander for 
miles together; more often he comes out alone, and 
you follow to where he has visited other coons, or 
gone to sleep in another tree of his own, or swung 
round in a vast circle to the tree from which he 
started, where he goes to sleep again till called out for 
another season by the spring sun and the chickadee's 
love notes. 



24 A Little Brother to the Bear 

It may be that all this is a bit of pure sociability on 
Mooweesuk's part, for it is certainly not his season of 
love-making or of finding a mate. Often, as I have 
said, three or four cubs will sleep the winter out in the 
same den; but again you may find two or three old 
coons in the same tree. Unlike many other animals 
with regard to their dens, the law of hospitality is 
strong with the coon, and a solitary old fellow that 
prefers to den by himself will never refuse to share 
his winter house with other coons that are driven out 
of their snug shelter; and this holds true notwith- 
standing the fact that there are plenty other hollow 
trees that seem to belong to the tribe in general, for 
they are visited freely by every passing coon. 

There is another way in which this love of his race is 
manifest, and it brings a thrill of admiration for Moo- 
weesuk whenever it is seen : he always comes, in the 
face of danger or death, to the cry of distress from one 
of his own kind. I have seen this several times, and 
once when it gave a thrill to the wild sport of night 
hunting that had unexpected consequences. It was 
near midnight in late November, at the end of the 
hunting season. The dogs had treed a coon, and by 
the aid of a bright fire of crackling brush we wore try- 
ing to " shine his eye," that is, to locate the game in 
the tree-tops by the fierce glow of his eves flashing 



A Little Brother to the Bear 25 

back the firelight. We saw it at last, and one of the 
hunters climbed the tree and tried to poke the coon 
from his perch with a stout pole. Instead of doing 
as was expected of him, Mooweesuk, who is always 
cool in the face of any danger, came swiftly along the 
limb showing his teeth, and with a snarl in his nose 
that was unmistakable. The hunter dropped his pole, 
pulled a revolver from his pocket, and shot the coon, 
which in a sudden rage turned and leaped for the 
howling dogs forty feet below. In a flash there was a 
terrible fight on. Mooweesuk, backed up against 
a tree, began the cool swift snaps and blows that took 
all the courage out of half his enemies. Now a dog 
was disabled by a single wolf grip on his sensitive 
nose ; now a favorite drew back howling, half-blinded 
by a lightning sweep of Mooweesuk's paw across both 
eyes. But the dogs were too many for any one fighter, 
however brave. They leaped in upon Mooweesuk 
from the sides ; two powerful dogs stretched him out ; 
then, knowing that his fight was almost lost, he twisted 
his head and gave a sudden fierce cry, the help call, 
entirely different from his screech and snarl of battle. 
Like a flash another coon, a young one, appeared on 
the scene, leaping out of the tree-top and hurling him- 
self into the fight, clawing and snapping like a fury, 
and sending out his battle yell. 



26 A Little Brother to the Bear 

Up to that moment none of us had suspected that 
there was a second coon anywhere near. He had 
remained hidden and safe in the tree-top through all 
the uproar, until what seemed plainly a call for help 
came, when he threw all thought of self aside and 
came down like a hero. 

We had not half realized all this when the little 
fellow threw himself upon the dog that held the first 
coon's neck and crushed a paw with a single grip of 
his powerful jaws. Then the bigger coon was on his 
feet again fighting feebly. But a curious change had 
come over the hunt. I had jumped forward to inter- 
fere at the unexpected heroism, but had drawn back 
at the thought that I was only a guest, and there by 
courtesy. Near me stood a big hunter, an owner of 
some of the dogs, whose face was twitching strangely 
in the firelight. He started for the fight swinging a 
club, then drew back ashamed to show any weak senti- 
ment in a coon hunt. " Save him," I whispered in his 
ear, "the little fellow deserves his life"; and again he 
jumped forward. " Drag off the dogs ! " he roared 
in a terrible voice, at the same time pulling away his 
own. Every hunter understood. There was a sudden 
wild yell with a thrill in it that made one's spine tingle 
gloriously. The dogs were dragged away by tails and 
legs, struggling and howling against the indignity; 



A Little Brother to the Bear 27 

the big coon lay down quietly to die; but the little 
fellow put his back up against a rock, his eyes glow- 
ing like coals that the wind blows upon, wrinkled his 
nose like a wolf, and snarled his defiance at the whole 
howling mob. And there he stayed till I took a pole 
and amid laughs and cheers pushed him, still protest- 
ing savagely, into another tree where the dogs could 
not get at him. 

That was far away from the place where my first 
Little Brother to the Bear lived, and many years had 
passed since I had visited the ledge by the old beaver 
dam. One day I came back, and turned swiftly into 
the old wood road that had a happy memory for me 
by every turn and rock and moldering stump. Here 
was where the grouse used to drum ; and there, at the 
end of the log, were signs to tell me that it still some- 
times rolled off the muffled thunder of the wings 
above. Here was the break in the wall that the fox 
used as a runway; and there was a crinkly yellow 
hair caught on a rough rock telling its story mutely. 
Here was where the pines stood thickest ; but they 
were all cut away now, and the hardwood seeds that 
had waited so many years under the pines for their 
chance at the sunlight were shooting up into vigorous 
life at last. And here was the place where the road 



28 A Little Brother to the Bear 

twisted about to look back on the pretty spot where 
the shy children lived, with whom I had once made 
friends. 

They were all gone, and the little house under the 
ledge was deserted. In one of the tumble-down rooms 
I found a rag doll beside the cold hearth, and some 
poor toys on a shelf under a broken window. In the 
whole lonely forgotten house these were the only 
things that brought the light to one's face and the 
moisture to his eyes as he beheld them. All else 
spoke of ruin and decay; but these poor playthings 
that little hands had touched went straight to the 
heart with an eternal suggesting of life and innocence 
and a childhood that never grows old in the world. 
I dusted them tenderly with my handkerchief and put 
them back in their places, and went away softly down 
the path that led to the other house where the Little 
Brother to the Bear used to live. 

Everything was changed here, too. The dam that 
the beavers had built, and that the years had covered 
over, still stood as strong as ever ; but the woods had 
been cut away, and the pond had dwindled till the wild 
duck no longer found a refuge there. The ledges were 
no longer green, for the sun that came in when the big 
trees fell had killed most of the mosses and ferns that 
decked them; and the brook's song, though cheery 



A Little Brother to the Bear 29 

still, was scarcely heard as it trickled and seeped where 
once it had rushed and tumbled down the woodsy 
valley, which remained woodsy still, because happily 
the soil there was too poor to raise anything but brush 
and cowslips, and so the woodsmen had spared it from 
desolation. 

The old tree that had once been the coon's house 
was blown down. When it missed the support and 
the wind-break of its fellows, it could not stand alone, 
and toppled over in the first storm. The old claw 
marks of Mooweesuk were hidden deep under lichens. 
From this ruined home I went to the den among the 
rocks by the path that the coons used to follow. The 
hunters had been here long ago; the den was pried 
open, the sheltering rocks were thrust aside, and the 
interior was full of last year's leaves. As I brushed 
them away sadly to see what the house was like, my 
hand struck something hard in a dark corner, and I 
brought it out into the light again. It was a little 
knot with a crook in it, all worn smooth by much 
handling — the plaything that I had first seen, and 
that was now the last memory of a home where the 
Little Brothers to the Bear had once lived and played 
together happily. 




HITOOWEEK, the woodcock, the 
strangest hermit in all the woods, is 
a bird of mystery. Only the hunters 
know anything about him, and they know him chiefly 
as a glorious bird that flashes up to the alder tops 
with a surprised twitter before their dogs, and poises 
there a moment on whirring wings to get his bear- 
ings, and then from his vantage-point at the moment 
of his exultation he either falls down dead at the 
bang of their guns and the rip of shot through the 
screen of leaves, or else happily he slants swiftly 
down to another hiding-place among the alders. To 
the hunters, who are practically his only human 
acquaintances, he is a game bird pure and simple, and 
their interest is chiefly in his death. The details of 
his daily life he hides from them, and from all others, 

30 



Whitooweek the Hermit 31 

in the dark woods, where he spends all the sunny 
hours, and in the soft twilight when he stirs abroad, 
like an owl, after his long day's rest. Of a hundred 
farmers on whose lands I have found Whitooweek or 
the signs of his recent feeding, scarcely five knew from 
observation that such a bird existed, so well does he 
play the hermit under our very noses. 

' The reasons for this are many. By day he rests 
on the ground in some dark bit of cover, by a brown 
stump that exactly matches his feathers, or in a tangle 
of dead leaves and brakes where it is almost impossible 
to see him. At such times his strange fearlessness of 
man helps to hide him, for he will let you pass within 
a few feet of him without stirring. That is partly 
because he sees poorly by day and perhaps does not 
realize how near you are, and partly because he knows 
that his soft colors hide him so well amidst his sur- 
roundings that you cannot see him, however near you 
come. This confidence of his is well placed, for once 
I saw a man step over a brooding woodcock on her 
nest in the roots of an old stump without seeing her, 
and she never moved so much as the tip of her long 
bill as he passed. In the late twilight, when woodcock 
first stir abroad, you see only a shadow passing swiftly 
across a bit of clear sky as Whitooweek goes off to the 
meadow brook to feed, or hear a rustle in the alders as 



32 A Little Brother to the Bear 

he turns the dead leaves over, and a faint peeunk, like 
the voice of a distant night-hawk, and then you catch 
a glimpse of a shadow that flits along the ground, or 
a weaving, batlike flutter of wings as you draw near 
to investigate. No wonder, under such circumstances, 
that Whitooweek passes all his summers and raises 
brood upon brood of downy invisible chicks in a 
farmer's wood lot without ever being found out or 
recognized. 

My own acquaintance with Whitooweek began 
when I was a child, when I had no name to give the 
strange bird that I watched day after day, and when 
those whom I asked for information laughed at my 
description and said no such bird existed. It was 
just beyond the upland pasture where the famous Old 
Beech Partridge lived. On the northern slopes were 
some dark, wet maple woods, and beyond that the 
ground slanted away through scrub and alders to a 
little wild meadow where cowslips grew beside the 
brook. One April day, in stealing through the maple 
woods, I stopped suddenly at seeing something shin- 
ing like a jewel almost at my feet. It was an eye, a 
bird's eye ; but it was some moments before I could 
realize that it was really a bird sitting there on her 
nest between the broken ends of an old stub that had 
fallen years ago. 



Whitooweek the Hermit 33 

I backed away quietly and knelt down to watch 
the queer find. Her bill was enormously long and 
straight, and her eyes were 'way up at the back of 
her head — that was the first observation. Some 
wandering horse had put his hoof down and made 
a hollow in the dry rotten wood of the fallen stub. 
Into this hollow a few leaves and brown grass stems 
had been gathered, — a careless kind of nest, yet serv- 
ing its purpose wonderfully, for it hid the brooding 
mother so well that one might step on her without 
ever knowing that bird or nest was near. This was 
the second wondering observation, as I made out the 
soft outlines of the bird sitting there, apparently with- 
out a thought of fear, within ten feet of my face. 

I went away quietly that day and left her undis- 
turbed; and I remember perfectly that I took with 
me something of the wonder, and something too of 
the fear, with which a child naturally meets the wild 
things for the first time. That she should be so still 
and fearless before me was a perfect argument to a 
child that she had some hidden means of defense — 
the long bill, perhaps, or a hidden sting — with which 
it was not well to trifle. All that seems very strange 
and far away to me now ; but it was real enough then 
to a very small boy, alone in the dark woods, who met 
for the first time a large bird with an enormously long 



34 A Little Brother to the Bear 

bill and eyes 'way up on the back of her head where 
they plainly did not belong ; a bird moreover that had 
no fear and seemed perfectly well able to take care of 
herself. So I went away softly and wondered about it. 
Next day I came back again. The strange bird was 
there on her nest as before, her long bill resting over 
the edge of the hollow and looking like a twig at 
the first glance. She showed no fear whatever, and 
encouraged at her quietness and assurance I crept 
nearer and nearer till I touched her bill with my fin- 
ger and turned it gently aside. At this she wiggled 
it impatiently, and my first child's observation was 
one that has only recently been noticed by natural- 
ists, namely, that the tip of the upper bill is flexible 
and can be moved about almost like the tip of a finger 
in order to find the food that lies deep in the mud, and 
seize it and drag it out of its hiding. At the same 
time she uttered a curious hissing sound that fright- 
ened me again and made me think of snakes and hid- 
den stings ; so I drew back and watched her from a 
safe distance. She sat for the most part perfectly 
motionless, the only movement being an occasional 
turning of the long bill ; and once when she had been 
still a very long time, I turned her head aside again, 
and to my astonishment and delight she made no 
objection, but left her head as I had turned it, and 



Whitooweek the Hermit 35 

presently she let me twist it back again. After her 
first warning she seemed to understand the situation 
perfectly, and had no concern for the wondering child 
that watched her and that had no intention whatever 
of harming her or her nest. 

Others had laughed at my description of a brown 
bird with a long bill and eyes at the back of her head 
that let you touch her on her nest, so I said no more 
to them; but at the first opportunity I hunted up 
Natty Dingle and told him all about it. Natty was a 
gentle, harmless, improvident little man, who would 
never do any hard work for pay, — it gave him cricks 
in his back, he said, — but would cheerfully half kill 
himself to go fishing through the ice, or to oblige a 
neighbor. So far as he earned a living, he did it by 
shooting and fishing and trapping and picking berries 
in their several seasons, and by gathering dandelions 
and cowslips (kew slops he called them) in the spring 
and peddling them good-naturedly from door to door. 
Most of his time, in pleasant weather, he spent in 
roaming about the woods, or lying on his back by the 
pond shore where the woods were thickest, fishing 
lazily and catching fish where no one else could ever 
get them, or watching an otter's den on a stream 
where no one else had seen an otter for forty years. 
He knew all about the woods, knew every bird and 



36 A Little Brother to the Bear 

beast and plant, and one boy at least, to my knowl- 
edge, would rather go with him for a day's fishing 
than see the President's train or go to a circus. 

Unlike the others, Natty did not laugh at my 
description, but listened patiently and told me I had 
found a woodcock's nest, — a rare thing, he said, for 
though he had roamed the woods so much, and shot 
hundreds of the birds in season, he had never yet 
chanced upon a nest. Next day he went with me, to 
see the eggs, he said ; but, as I think of it now, it was 
probably with a view of locating the brood accurately 
for the August shooting. As we rounded the end of 
the fallen stub the woodcock's confidence deserted her 
at sight of the stranger, and she slipped away noise- 
lessly into the leafy shadows. Then we saw her four 
eggs, very big at one end, very little at the other, and 
beautifully colored and spotted. 

Natty, who was wise in his way, merely glanced at 
the nest and then drew me aside into hiding, and before 
we knew it, or had even seen her approach, Mother 
Woodcock was brooding her eggs again. Then Natty, 
who had doubted one part of my story, whispered to 
me to go out ; and the bird never stirred as I crept 
near on hands and knees and touched her as before. 

A few minutes later we crept away softly, and Natty 
took me to the swamp to show me the borings, telling 



Whitooweek the Hermit 37 

me on the way of the woodcock's habits as he had seen 
them in the fall hunting. The borings we found in 
plenty wherever the earth was soft, — numerous holes, 
as if made with a pencil, where the woodcock had 
probed the earth with her long bill. She was hunt- 
ing for earthworms," Natty told me, — a queer mistake 
of his, and of all the bird books as well; for in the 
primitive alder woods and swamps where the borings 
are so often seen, there are no earthworms, but only 
slugs and soft beetles and delicate white grubs. Wood- 
cock hunt by scent and feeling, and also by listening 
for the slight sounds made by the worms underground, 
he told me, and that is why the eyes are far back on 
the head, to be out of the way, and also to watch for 
danger above and behind while the bird's bill is deep 
in the mud. And that also explains why the tip of 
the bill is flexible, so that when the bird bores in the 
earth and has failed to locate the game accurately by 
hearing, the sensitive tip of the bill feels around, like 
a finger, until it finds and seizes the morsel. All this 
and many things more he told me as we searched 
through the swamp for the signs of Mother Wood- 
cock's hunting and made our way home together in 
the twilight. Some things were true, some erroneous ; 
and some were a curious blending of accurate tradi- 
tions and imaginative folk-lore from some unknown 



38 A Little Brother to the Bear 

source, such as is still held as knowledge of birds 
and beasts in all country places; and these were 
the most interesting of all to a child. And the boy 
listened, as a devotee listens to a great sacred con- 
cert, and remembered all these things and afterwards 
sifted them and found out for himself what things 
were true. 

When I went back to the spot, a few days later, the 
nest was deserted. A few bits of shell scattered about 
told me the story, and that I must now hunt for the 
little woodcocks, which are almost impossible to find 
unless the mother herself show you where they are. 
A week later, as I prowled along the edge of the 
swamp, a sudden little brown whirlwind seemed to 
roll up the leaves at my feet. In the midst of it I 
made out the woodcock fluttering away, clucking, and 
trailing now a wing and now a leg, as if desperately 
hurt. Of course I followed her to see what was the 
matter, forgetting the partridge that had once played 
me the same pretty trick to decoy me away from her 
chicks. When she had led me to a safe distance all 
her injuries vanished as at the touch of magic. She 
sprang up on strong wings, whirled across the swamp, 
and circled swiftly back to where I had first started 
her. But I did not find one of the little woodcocks, 
though I hunted for them half an hour, and there 



Whitooweek the Hermit 39 

were four of them, probably, hiding among the leaves 
and grass stems under my very eyes. 

The wonderful knowledge gleaned from Natty 
Dingle's store and from the borings in the swamp 
brought me into trouble and conflict a few weeks 
later. Not far from me lived a neighbor's boy, a 
budding naturalist, who had a big yellow cat named 
Blink at his house. A queer old cat was Blink, and 
the greatest hunter I ever saw. He knew, for instance, 
where a mole could be found in his long tunnel, — and 
that is something that still puzzles me, — and caught 
scores of them ; but, like most cats, he could never be 
induced to taste one. When he caught a mole and 
was hungry, he would hide it and go off to catch a 
mouse or a bird ; and these he would eat, leaving the 
mole to be brought home as game. He would hunt 
by himself for hours at a time, and come meowing 
home, bringing everything he caught, — rats, squirrels, 
rabbits, quail, grouse, and even grasshoppers when no 
bigger game was afoot. At a distance we would hear 
his call, a peculiar yeow-yow that he gave only when 
he had caught something, and the boy would run out 
to meet him and take his game, while Blink purred 
and rubbed against his legs to show his pride and 
satisfaction. When no one met him he would go 
meowing round the house once or twice and then 



4-0 A Little Brother to the Bear 

put his game under the door-step, where our noses 
must speedily call it to our attention, for Blink would 
never touch it again. 

One day the boy found a strange bird under the 
door-step, a beautiful brown creature, as large as a 
pigeon, with a long, straight bill, and eyes at the top 
of its head. He took it to his father, a dogmatic little 
man, who gave him a queer mixture of truth and non- 
sense as his portion of natural history. It was a blind 
snipe, he said ; and there was some truth in that. It 
couldn't see because its eyes were out of place; it was 
a very scarce bird that appeared occasionally in the fall, 
and that burrowed in the mud for the winter instead 
of migrating, — and all this was chiefly nonsense. 

When the boy took me to see his queer find I called 
it a woodcock and began to tell about it eagerly, but 
was stopped short and called a liar for my pains. A 
wordy war followed, in which Natty Dingle's authority 
was invoked in vain ; and the boy, being bigger than 
I and in his own yard, drove me away at last for dar- 
ing to tell him about a bird that his own cat had 
caught and that his own father had called a blind 
snipe. He pegged one extra stone after me for say- 
ing that there were plenty of them about, only they 
fed by night, like owls, and another stone for shout- 
ing back that they did not burrow in the mud like 



Whitooweek the Hermit 41 

turtles in dry weather, as his oracle had declared. 
And this untempered zeal is very much like what 
one generally encounters when he runs up against 
the prejudices of naturalists anywhere. Hear all they 
say, — that the earth is flat, that swallows spend the 
winter in the mud, that animals are governed wholly 
by instinct, — but don't quote any facts you may have 
seen until the world is ready for them. For it is 
better to call a thing a blind snipe, and know better, 
than to raise a family row and be hit on the head with 
a stone for calling it a woodcock. 

The little woodcocks, though scarcely bigger than 
bumblebees, run about hardily, like young partridges, 
the moment they chip the shell, and begin at once to 
learn from the mother where to look for food. In the 
early twilight, when they are less wild and the mother 
is not so quick to flutter away and draw you after her, 
I have sometimes surprised a brood of them, — wee, 
downy, invisible things, each with a comically long 
bill and a stripe down his back, which seems to divide 
the little fellow and hide one half of him even after 
you have discovered the other. The mother is with 
them, and leads them swiftly among the bogs and 
ferns and alder stems, where they go about turning 
over the dead leaves and twigs and shreds of wet bark 
with their bills for the grubs that hide beneath, like 



42 A Little Brother to the Bear 

a family of rag-pickers, each with a little stick to turn 
things over. Mother and chicks have a contented little 
twitter at such times that I have never heard under 
any other circumstances, which is probably intended 
to encourage each other and keep all the family within 
hearing as they run about in the twilight. 

When the feeding-grounds are far away from the 
nest, as is often the case, Whitooweek has two habits 
that are not found, I think, in any other game birds 
— except perhaps the plover ; and I have never been 
able to watch the young of these birds, though every 
new observation of the old ones serves to convince 
me that they are the most remarkable birds that visit 
us, and the least understood. When food must be 
hunted for at a long distance, the mother will leave 
her brood in hiding and go herself to fetch it. When 
she returns she feeds the chicks, like a mother dove, 
by putting her bill in their throats and giving each 
his portion, going and coming until they are satisfied, 
when she leaves them in hiding again and feeds for 
herself during the rest of the night. Like most 
other young birds and animals when left thus by 
their mothers, they never leave the spot where they 
have been told to stay, and can hardly be driven away 
from it until the mother returns. And generally, when 
you find a brood of young woodcock without the 



Whitooweek the Hermit 43 

mother, they will let you pick them up and will lie 
as if dead in your hand, playing possum, until you 
put them down again. 

When there is a good feeding-ground near at hand, 
yet too far for the little chicks to travel, the mother 
will take them there, one by one, and hide them in 
a secret spot until she has brought the whole family. 
Two or three times I have seen woodcock fly away 
with their young ; and once I saw a mother return to 
the spot from which, a few moments before, she had 
flown away with a chick and take another from under 
a leaf where I had not seen him. This curious 
method is used by the mothers not only to take the 
young to favorable feeding-grounds, but also to get 
them quickly out of the way when sudden danger 
threatens, like fire or flood, from which it is im- 
possible to hide. 

So far as I can judge the process, which is always 
quickly done and extremely difficult to follow, the 
mother lights or walks directly over the chick and 
holds him between her knees as she flies. This is 
the way it seems to me after seeing it several times. 
There are those — and they are hunters and keen 
observers — who claim that the mother carries them 
in her bill, as a cat carries a kitten ; but how that is 
possible without choking the little fellows is to me 



44 A Little Brother to the Bear 

incomprehensible. The bill is not strong enough at 
the tip, I think, to hold them by a wing; and to grasp 
them by the neck, as in a pair of shears, and so to 
carry them, would, it seems to me, most certainly suf- 
focate or injure them in any prolonged flight; and 
that is not the way in which wild mothers generally 
handle their little ones. 

There is another possible way in which Whitoo 
week may carry her young, though I have never seen 
it. An old hunter and keen observer of wild life, with 
whom I sometimes roam the woods, once stumbled 
upon a mother woodcock and her brood by a little 
brook at the foot of a wild hillside. One of the chicks 
was resting upon the mother's back, just as one often 
sees a domestic chicken. At my friend's sudden 
approach the mother rose, taking the chick with her 
on her back, and vanished among the thick leaves. 
The rest of the brood, three of them, disappeared 
instantly; and the man, after finding one of them, 
went on his way without waiting to see whether the 
mother returned for the rest. I give the incident for 
what it is worth as a possible suggestion as to the 
way in which young woodcock are carried to and fro ; 
but I am quite sure that those that have come under 
my own observation were carried by an entirely 
different method. 



' One of the chicks was resting 
upon the mother's back " 



Whitooweek the Hermit 45 

The young woodcock begin to use their tiny wings 
within a few days of leaving the eggs, earlier even 
than young quail, and fly in a remarkably short time. 
They grow with astonishing rapidity, thanks to their 
good feeding, so that often by early summer the family 
scatters, each one to take care of himself, leaving the 
mother free to raise another brood. At such times 
they travel widely in search of favorite food and come 
often into the farm-yards, spending half the night about 
the drains and stables while the house is still, and van- 
ishing quickly at the first alarm ; so that Whitooweek 
is frequently a regular visitor in places where he is 
never seen or suspected. 

In his fondness for earthworms Whitooweek long 
ago learned some things that a man goes all his life 
without discovering, namely, that it is much easier 
and simpler to pick up worms than to dig for them. 
When a boy has to dig bait, as the price of going fish- 
ing with his elders, he will often spend half a day, in 
dry weather, working hard with very small results ; 
for the worms are deep in the earth at such times and 
can be found only in favored places. Meanwhile the 
father, who has sent his boy out to dig, will spend a 
pleasant hour after supper in watering his green lawn. 
The worms begin to work their way up to the surface 
at the first patter of water-drops, and by midnight are 



46 A Little Brother to the Bear 

crawling about the lawn by hundreds, big, firm-bodied 
fellows, just right for trout fishing. They stay on the 
surface most of the night ; and that is why the early 
bird catches the worm, instead of digging him out, as 
the sleepy fellows must do. Midnight is the best time 
to go out with your lantern and get all the bait you 
want without trouble or worry. That is also the time 
when you are most likely to find Whitooweek at the 
same occupation. Last summer I flushed two wood- 
cock from my neighbor's lawn in the late evening ; 
and hardly a summer goes by that you do not read 
with wonder of their being found within the limits of 
a great city like New York, whither they have come 
from a distance by night to hunt the rich lawns over. 
For the same fare of earthworms they visit the gardens 
as well ; and often in a locality where no wood- 
cock are supposed to exist you will find, under the 
cabbage leaves, or in the cool shade of the thick corn- 
field, the round holes where Whitooweek has been 
probing the soft earth for grubs and worms while 
you slept. 

When midsummer arrives a curious change comes 
over Whitooweek; the slight family ties are broken, 
and the bird becomes a hermit indeed for the rest of 
the year. He lives entirely alone, and not even in the 
migrating season does he join with his fellows in any 



Whitooweek the Hermit 47 

large numbers, as most other birds do ; and no one, so 
far as I know, has ever seen anything that might be 
appropriately called a flock of woodcock. The only 
exception to this rule that I know is when, on rare 
occasions, you surprise a male woodcock strutting on 
a log, like a grouse, spreading wings and tail, and hiss- 
ing and sputtering queerly as he moves up and down. 
Then, if you creep near, you will flush two or three 
other birds that are watching beside the log, or in 
the underbrush close at hand. One hunter told me 
recently that his setter once pointed a bird on a fallen 
log, that ceased his strutting as soon as he was dis- 
covered and slipped down into the ferns. When the 
dog drew nearer, five woodcock flushed at the same 
moment, the greatest number that I have ever known 
being found together. 

When I asked the unlearned hunter — who was yet 
wise in the ways of the woods — the reason for Whitoo- 
week's strutting at this season, after the families have 
scattered, he had no theory or explanation. " Just a 
queer streak, same's most birds have, on'y queerer," he 
said, and let it go at that. I have seen the habit but 
once, and then imperfectly, for I blundered upon two 
or three birds and flushed them before I could watch 
the performance. It is certainly not to win his mate, 
for the season for that is long past ; and unless it be a 



48 A Little Brother to the Bear 

suggestion of the grouse habit of gathering in small 
bands for a kind of rude dance, I am at a loss to account 
for it. Possibly play may appeal even to Whitooweek, 
as it certainly appeals to all other birds ; and it is play 
alone that can make him forget he is a hermit. 

With the beginning of the molt the birds desert the 
woods and swamps where they were reared and dis- 
appear absolutely. Whither they go at this time is 
a profound mystery. In places where there were a 
dozen birds yesterday there are none to-day; and 
when you do stumble upon one it is generally in a 
spot where you never found one before, and where you 
will probably not find another, though you haunt the 
spot for years. This is the more remarkable in view 
of the fact that the woodcock, like most other birds, 
has certain favored spots to which he returns, to nest 
or feed or sleep, year after year. 

Occasionally at this season you may find a solitary 
bird on a dry southern hillside, or on the sunny edge 
of the big woods. He is pitiful now to behold, having 
scarcely any feathers left to cover him, and can only 
flutter or run away at your approach. If you have 
the rare fortune to surprise him now when he does 
not see you, you will note a curious thing. He stands 
beside a stump or brake where the sun can strike his 
bare back fairly, as if he were warming himself at 



Whitooweek the Hermit 49 

nature's fireplace. His long bill rests its tip on the 
ground, as if it were a prop supporting his head. 
He is asleep; but if you crawl near and bring your 
glasses to bear, you will find that he sleeps with half 
an eye open. The lower lid seems to be raised till it 
covers half the eye; but the upper half is clear, so 
that as he sleeps he can watch above and behind for 
his enemies. He gives out very little scent at such 
times, and your keen-nosed dog, that would wind him 
at a stone's throw in the autumn, will now pass close 
by without noticing him, and must almost run over 
the bird before he draws to a point or shows any 
signs that game is near. 

Hunters say that these scattered birds are those 
that have lost the most feathers, and that they keep to 
the sunny open spots for the sake of getting warm. 
Perhaps they are right; but one must still ask the 
question, what do these same birds do at night when 
the air is colder than by day? And, as if to contra- 
dict the theory, when you have found one bird on a 
sunny open hillside, you will find the next one a mile 
away asleep in the heart of a big corn-field, where the 
sun barely touches him the whole day long. 

Whatever the reason for their action, these birds 
that you discover in July are rare, incomprehensible 
individuals. The bulk of the birds disappear, and you 



50 A Little Brother to the Bear 

cannot find them. Whether they scatter widely to 
dense hiding-places and by sitting close escape discov- 
ery, or whether, like some of the snipe, they make a 
short northern migration in the molting season in 
search of solitude and a change of food, is yet to be 
discovered. For it is astonishing how very little we 
know of a bird that nests in our cow pasture and that 
often visits our yards and lawns nightly, but whose 
acquaintance we make only when he is dead and 
served as a delicious morsel, hot on toast, on our 
dining-tables. 

In the spring, while winning his mate, Whitooweek 
has one habit which, when seen at the edge of the 
alder patch, reminds you instantly of the grass-plovers 
of the open moors and uplands, and of their wilder 
namesakes of the Labrador barrens. Indeed, in his 
fondness for burned plains, where he can hide in plain 
sight and catch no end of grasshoppers and crickets 
without trouble to vary his diet, and in a swift change- 
ableness and fearlessness of man, Whitooweek has 
many points in common with the almost unknown 
plovers. In the dusk of the evening, as you steal 
along the edge of the woods, you will hear a faint 
peenk, peenk close beside you, and as you turn to listen 
and locate the sound a woodcock slants swiftly up 
over your head and begins to whirl in a spiral towards 



Whitooweek the Hermit 51 

the heavens, clucking and twittering ecstatically. It 
is a poor kind of song, not to be compared with that of 
the oven-bird or grass-plover, who do the same thing 
at twilight, and Whitooweek must help his voice by 
the clicking of his wings and by the humming of air 
through them, like the sharp voice of a reed in windy 
weather ; but it sounds sweet enough, no doubt, to the 
little brown mate who is standing perfectly still near 
you, watching and listening to the performance. At 
an enormous height, for him, Whitooweek whirls about 
madly for a few moments and then retraces his spiral 
downwards, clucking and twittering the while, until he 
reaches the tree-tops, where he folds his wings directly 
over his mate and drops like a plummet at her head. 
Still she does not move, knowing well what is coming, 
and when within a few feet of the ground Whitooweek 
spreads his wings wide to break his fall and drops 
quietly close beside her. There he remains quite still 
for a moment, as if exhausted ; but the next moment 
he is strutting about her, spreading wings and tail like 
a wild turkey-gobbler, showing all his good points to 
the best advantage, and vain of all his performances 
as a peacock in the spring sunshine. Again he is 
quiet ; a faint peenk, peenk sounds, as if it were a mile 
away ; and again Whitooweek slants up on swift wings 
to repeat his ecstatic evolutions. 



52 A Little Brother to the Bear 

Both birds are strangely fearless of men at such 
times ; and if you keep still, or move very softly if you 
move at all, they pay no more attention to you than if 
you were one of the cattle cropping the first bits of 
grass close at hand. Like the golden plover, whose 
life is spent mostly in the vast solitudes of Labrador 
and Patagonia, and whose nature is a curious mixture 
of extreme wildness and dense stupidity, they seem to 
have no instinctive fear of any large animal ; and what- 
ever fear Whitooweek has learned is the result of 
persistent hunting. Even in this he is slower to learn 
than any other game bird, and when let alone for a 
little season promptly returns to his native confidence. 

When the autumn comes you will notice another 
suggestion of the unknown plover in Whitooweek. 
Just as you look confidently for the plover's arrival in 
the first heavy northeaster after August 20, so the first 
autumn moon that is obscured by heavy fog will surely 
bring the woodcock back to his accustomed haunts 
again. But why he should wait for a full moon, and 
then for a chill mist to cover it, before beginning his 
southern flight, is one of the mysteries. Unlike the 
plovers that come by hundreds, and whose eerie cry, 
shrilling above the roar of the storm and the rush of 
rain, brings you out of your bed at midnight to thrill 
and listen and thrill again, Whitooweek slips in 



Whitooweek the Hermit 53 

silent and solitary ; and you go out in the morning, as 
to an appointment, and find him sleeping quietly just 
where you expected him to be. 

With the first autumn flight another curious habit 
comes out, namely, that Whitooweek has a fondness 
for certain spots, not for any food or protection they 
give him, but evidently from long association, as a 
child loves certain unkempt corners of an upland 
pasture above twenty other more beautiful spots that 
one would expect him to like better. Moreover, the 
scattered birds, in some unknown way, seem to keep 
account of the place, as if it were an inn, and so long 
as they remain in the neighborhood will often keep 
this one particular spot filled to its full complement. 

Some three miles north of where I write there is a 
certain small patch of tall open woods that a few 
hunters have known and tended for years, while others 
passed by carelessly, for it is the least likely looking 
spot for game in the whole region. Yet if there is but 
a single woodcock in all Fairfield County, in these 
days of many hunters and few birds, the chances are 
that he will be there ; and if you do not find one there 
on the first morning after a promising spell of weather, 
you may be almost certain that the flight is not yet 
on, or has passed you by. Several times after flushing 
a solitary woodcock in this spot I have gone over the 



54 ^i Little Brother to the Bear 

whole place to find some reason for Whitooweek's 
strange fancy; but all in vain. The ground is open 
and stony, with hardly a fern or root or grass tuft to 
shelter even a woodcock; and look as closely as you 
will you can find no boring or sign of Whitooweek's 
feeding. From all external appearances it is the last 
spot where you would expect to find such a bird, and 
there are excellent covers close at hand ; yet here 
is where Whitooweek loves to lie during the day, and 
to this spot he will return as long as there are any 
woodcock left. Hunters may harry the spot to-day 
and kill the few rare birds that still visit it ; but 
to-morrow, if there be any birds in the whole neigh- 
borhood, there will be practically the same number 
just where the first were killed. 

I have questioned old gunners about this spot, — 
which I discovered by flushing two woodcock at a 
time when none were to be found, though they were 
searched for by a score of young hunters and dogs, — 
and find that it has been just so as long as they can 
remember. Years ago, when the birds were plenty 
and little known, five or six might be found here on a 
half-acre at any time during the flight. If these were 
killed off, others took their places, and the supply 
seemed to be almost a constant quantity as long as 
there were birds enough in the surrounding coverts 



Whitooweek the Hermit 55 

to draw upon; but why they haunt this spot more 
than others, and why the vacant places are so quickly 
filled, are two questions that no man can answer. 

One hunter suggests to me, doubtfully, that possibly 
this may be accounted for by the migrating birds that 
are moving southward during the flight, and that drop 
into the best unoccupied places; and the same expla- 
nation will occur to others. The objection to this is 
that the birds migrate by night, and by night this 
spot is always unoccupied. The woodcock use it for 
a resting-place only by day, and by night they scatter 
widely to the feeding-grounds, whither also the migrat- 
ing birds first make their way ; for Whitooweek must 
feed often, his food being easily digested, and can prob- 
ably make no sustained flights. He seems to move 
southward by easy stages, feeding as he goes ; and so 
the new-comers would meet the birds that lately occu- 
pied the spot on the feeding-grounds, if indeed they 
met them at all, and from there would come with them 
at daylight to the resting-places they had selected. But 
how do the new-comers, who come by night, learn that 
the favored spots are already engaged by day, or that 
some of the birds that occupied them yesterday are 
now dead and their places vacant ? 

The only possible explanation is either to say that 
it is a matter of chance — which is no explanation at 



56 A Little Brother to the Bear 

all, and foolish also ; for chance, if indeed there be any 
such blind unreasonable thing in a reasonable world, 
does not repeat itself regularly — or to say frankly that 
there is some definite understanding and communi- 
cation among the birds as they flit to and fro in the 
night; which is probably true, but obviously impossible 
to prove with our present limited knowledge. 

This fondness for certain spots shows itself in 
another way when you are on the trail of the hermit. 
When flushed from a favorite resting-place and not 
shot at, he makes but a short flight, up to the brush 
tops and back again, and then goes quietly back to 
the spot from which he rose as soon as you are gone 
away. He has also the hare trick of returning in a 
circle to his starting-point; and occasionally, when you 
flush a bird and watch sharply, you may see him slant 
down on silent wings behind you and light almost at 
your heels. Once my old dog Don started a wood- 
cock and remained stanchly pointing at the spot where 
he had been. I remained where I was, a few yards in 
the rear, and in a moment Whitooweek whirled in from 
behind and dropped silently into some brakes between 
me and the dog and not ten feet from the old setter's 
tail. The ruse succeeded perfectly, for as the scent 
faded away from Don's nose he went forward, and so 
missed the bird that was watching him close behind. 



Whitooweek the Hermit 57 

This curious habit may be simply the result of 
Whitooweek's fondness for certain places ; or it may 
be that by night he carefully selects the spot where 
he can rest and hide during the day, and returns to it 
because he cannot find another so good while the sun 
dazzles his eyes ; or it may be a trick pure and simple 
to deceive the animal that disturbs him, by lighting 
close behind where neither dog nor man will ever 
think of looking for him. 

By night, when he sees perfectly and moves about 
rapidly from one feeding-ground to another, Whitoo- 
week is easily dazzled by a light of any kind, and he 
is one of the many creatures that come and go within 
the circle of your jack. Because he is silent at such 
times, and moves swiftly, he is generally unnamed — 
just a night bird, you think, and let him pass without 
another thought. Several times when jacking, to see 
what birds and animals I might surprise and watch by 
night, I have recognized Whitooweek whirling wildly 
about my circle of light. Once, deep in the New 
Brunswick wilderness, I surprised two poachers spear- 
ing salmon at midnight with a fire-basket hung over 
the bow of their canoe. Spite of its bad name it is a 
magnificent performance, skillful and daring beyond 
measure ; so instead of driving them off I asked for a 
seat in their Ions: dugout to see how it was done. 



58 A Little Brother to the Bear 

As we swept up and down the dangerous river, with 
pitch-pine blazing and crackling and the black shadows 
jumping about us, two woodcock sprang up from the 
shore and whirled madly around the pirogue. One 
brushed my face with his wings, and was driven away 
only when Sandy in the bow gave a mighty lunge of 
his spear and with a howl of exultation flung a twenty- 
pound, kicking salmon back into my lap. But several 
times that night I saw the flash of their wings, or heard 
their low surprised twitter above the crackle of the fire 
and the rush and roar of the rapids. 

When he finds good feeding-grounds on his south- 
ern migrations, Whitooweek will stay with us, if undis- 
turbed, until a sharp frost seals up his storehouse by 
making the ground too hard for his sensitive bill to 
penetrate. Then he slips away southward to the next 
open spring or alder run. Not far away, on Shippan 
Point, is a little spring that rarely freezes and whose 
waters overflow and make a green spot even in mid- 
winter. The point is well covered with houses now, 
but formerly it was good woodcock ground, and the 
little spring always welcomed a few of the birds with 
the welcome that only a spring can give. Last year, 
at Christmas time, I found a woodcock there quite at 
home, within a stone's throw of two or three houses, 
and with snow lying deep all around him. He had 



Whitooweek the Hermit 59 

lingered there weeks after all other birds had gone, 
either held by old associations and memories of a 
time when only the woodcock knew the place ; or 
else, wounded and unable to fly, he had sought out 
the one spot in all the region where he might live 
and be fed until his wing should heal. Nature, whom 
men call cruel, had cared for him tenderly, healing his 
wounds that man had given, and giving him food and 
a safe refuge at a time when all other feeding-grounds 
were held fast in the grip of winter ; but men, who can 
be kind and reasonable, saw no deep meaning in it all. 
The day after I found him a hunter passed that way, 
and was proud of having killed the very last woodcock 
of the season. 




\ HERE is one astonishing thing about Whitoo- 
week which can scarcely be called a habit, but which 
is probably the discovery of one or two rare individuals 
here and there more original than their fellows. Like 
the eider-ducks and the bear and the beaver, Whitoo 
week sometimes uses a rude kind of surgery for bind- 
ing up his wounds. Twenty years ago, while sitting 
quietly by a brook at the edge of the woods, in Bridge- 
water, a woodcock suddenly fluttered out into the open 
and made his way to a spot on the bank where a light 
streak of sticky mud and clay showed clearly from 
where I was watching. It was the early hunting sea- 
son and gunners were abroad in the land, and my first 
impression was that this was a wounded bird that had 
made a long flight after being shot, and that had now 

come out to the stream to drink or to bathe his wound. 

60 



A Woodcock Genius 61 

Whether this were so or not is a matter of guesswork ; 
but the bird was acting strangely in broad daylight, 
and I crept nearer till I could see him plainly on the 
other side of the little stream, though he was still too 
far away for me to be absolutely sure of what all his 
motions meant. 

At first he took soft clay in his bill from the edge 
of the water and seemed to be smearing it on one leg 
near the knee. Then he fluttered away on one foot 
for a short distance and seemed to be pulling tiny 
roots and fibers of grass, which he worked into the 
clay that he had already smeared on his leg. Again 
he took more clay and plastered it over the fibers, 
putting on more and more till I could plainly see the 
enlargement, working away with strange, silent intent- 
ness for fully fifteen minutes, while I watched and 
wondered, scarce believing my eyes. Then he stood 
perfectly still for a full hour under an overhanging 
sod, where the eye could with difficulty find him, his 
only motion meanwhile being an occasional rubbing 
and smoothing of the clay bandage with his bill, until 
it hardened enough to suit him, whereupon he fluttered 
away from the brook and disappeared in the thick 
woods. 

I had my own explanation of the incredible action, 
namely, that the woodcock had a broken leg, and had 



62 A Little hr other to the Bear 

deliberately put it into a clay cast to hold the broken 
bones in place until they should knit together again ; 
but naturally I kept my own counsel, knowing that 
no one would believe in the theory. For years I 
questioned gunners closely, and found two who said 
that they had killed woodcock whose legs had at one 
time been broken and had healed again. As far as 
they could remember, the leg had in each case healed 
perfectly straight instead of twisting out to one side, 
as a chicken's leg does when broken and allowed to 
knit of itself. I examined hundreds of woodcock in 
the markets in different localities, and found one whose 
leg had at one time been broken by a shot and then 
had healed perfectly. There were plain signs of dried 
mud at the break ; but that was also true of the other 
leg near the foot, which only indicated that the bird 
had been feeding in soft places. All this proved 
nothing to an outsider, and I kept silence as to what 
I had seen until last winter, twenty years afterwards, 
when the confirmation came unexpectedly. I had been 
speaking of animals before the Contemporary Club of 
Bridgeport when a gentleman, a lawyer well known 
all over the state, came to me and told me eagerly of 
a curious find he had made the previous autumn. He 
was gunning one day with a friend, when they shot a 
woodcock, which on being brought in by the dog was 



A Woodcock Genius 63 

found to have a lump of hard clay on one of its legs. 
Curious to know what it meant he chipped the clay 
off with his penknife and found a broken bone, which 
was then almost healed and as straight as ever. A few 
weeks later the bird, had he lived, would undoubtedly 
have taken off the cast himself and there would have 
been nothing to indicate anything unusual about him. 
So I give the observation now, at last, since proof 
is at hand, not to indicate a new or old habit of Whit- 
ooweek, — for how far the strange knowledge is spread 
among the woodcock and the wading birds no man can 
say, — but simply to indicate how little we know of the 
inner life of the hermit, and indeed of all wild birds, 
and how much there is yet to be discovered when we 
shall lay aside the gun for the field-glass and learn to 
interpret the wonderful life which goes on unseen all 
about us. 1 

1 Since the above observation was published, several cases have been 
brought to my attention which prove conclusively that this habit of setting 
a broken leg in a clay cast is more widespread among woodcock and snipe 
than I had believed possible. In an article in Science (May 13, 1904, 
Vol. XIX, N.S., No. 489, pp. 760 ff.) I have mentioned a few of these cases 
and given the evidence that supports them. 




ATE one winter afternoon, when the 
sun was gilding the pines on the 
western mountains and the shadows 
stretched long and chill through the snow-laden woods, 
a huge bull moose broke out of the gloom of the 
spruces and went swinging up the long, sunlit barren 
at a stride whose length and power would have dis- 
couraged even a wolf from following. Five minutes 
later I came out of the same tunnel under the spruces 
just as the fringe of green across the barren swished 
back to cover the flanks of the plunging bull, and then 
nodded and nodded in twenty directions — This way I 
that way! here! yonder! — to mislead any that might 
follow on his track. For at times even the hemlocks 
and the alders, the waters and the leaves, the creak- 
ing boughs and the dancing shadows, all seem to 

6 4 



When Upweekis Goes Hunting 65 

conspire to shield the innocent Wood Folk from the 
hostile eyes and hands of those that pursue them. 
And that is one reason why it is so hard to see game 
in the woods. 

The big moose had fooled me that time. When he 
knew that I was following him he ran far ahead, and 
then circled swiftly back to stand motionless in a hill- 
side thicket within twenty yards of the trail that he 
had made scarcely an hour agone. There he could 
see perfectly, without being seen, what it was that was 
following him. When I came by, following swiftly 
and silently the deep tracks in the snow, he let me 
pass below him while he took a good look and a sniff 
at me ; then he glided away like a shadow in the oppo- 
site direction. Unfortunately a dead branch under 
the snow broke with a dull snap beneath his cautious 
hoof, and I turned aside from the trail to see what it 
was that had snapped the twig — and so saved myself 
the long tramp up and down the cunning trails. 
When he saw that his trick was discovered he broke 
away for the open barren, with all his wonderful 
powers of eye and ear and tireless legs alert to save 
himself from the man whom he mistook for his deadly 
enemy. 

It was of small use to follow him farther, so I sat 
down on a prostrate yellow birch to rest and listen 



66 A Little Brother to the Bear 

awhile in the vast silence, and to watch anything that 
might be passing through the cold white woods. 

Under the fringe of evergreen the soft purple 
shadows jumped suddenly, and a hare as white as the 
snow bounded out. In long nervous jumps, like a 
bundle of wire springs, he went leaping before my face 
across a narrow arm of the barren to the shelter of a 
point below. The soft arms of the ground spruces 
and the softer shadows beneath them seemed to open 
of their own accord to let him in. All nodding of 
branches and dropping of snow pads and jumping 
of shadows ceased instantly, and all along the fringe 
of evergreen silent voices were saying, There is noth- 
ing here ; we have not seen him ; there is nothing here. 

Now why did he run that way, I thought ; for 
Moktaques is a crazy, erratic fellow and never does 
things in a businesslike way unless he has to. As I 
wondered, there was a gleam of yellow fire under the 
purple shadows whence Moktaques had come, and the 
fierce round head of a Canada lynx was thrust out of 
the tunnel that the hare had made only a moment 
before. His big gray body had scarcely pushed itself 
into sight when the shadows stirred farther down the 
fringe of evergreen ; another and another lynx glided 
out; and I caught my breath as five of the savage 
creatures swept across the narrow arm of the barren, 



When Upweekis Goes Hunting 67 

each with his head thrust out, his fierce eyes piercing 
the gloom ahead like golden lances, and holding his 
place in the stately, appalling line of fierceness and 
power as silent as the shadow of death. My nerves 
shivered at the thought of what would happen to 
Moktaques when one of the line should discover and 
jump him. Indeed, having no rifle, I was glad enough 
myself to sit very still and let the savage creatures go 
by without finding me. » 

The middle lynx, a fierce old female, was following 
the hare's trail ; and in a moment it flashed across me 
who she was, and what they were all doing. Here, at 
last, was the secret of the lynx bands that one some- 
times finds in the winter woods, and that occasionally 
threaten or appall one with a ferocity that the indi- 
vidual animals never manifest. For Upweekis, though 
big and fierce, is at heart a slinking, cowardly, treach- 
erous creature, like all cats, and so loves best to be 
alone. Knowing that the rest of his tribe are like 
himself, he suspects them all and is fearful that in any 
division of common spoils somebody else would get the 
lion's share. And so I have never found among the 
cats any trace of the well-defined regulations that seem 
to prevail among nearly all other animals. 

In winter, however, it is different. Then neces- 
sity compels Upweekis to lay aside some of his feline 



68 A Little Brother to the Bear 

selfishness and hunt in small bands. Every seven 
years, especially, when rabbits are scarce in the woods 
because of the sickness that kills them off periodically, 
you may stumble upon one of these pirate crews 
haunting the deer yards or following after the caribou 
herds; but until the ferocious line swept out of the 
purple shadows under my very eyes I had no idea that 
these bands are — almost invariably, as I have since 
learned — family parties that hold together through 
the winter, just as fawns follow the old doe until the 
spring comes, in order that her wisdom may find them 
food, and her superior strength break a way for them 
when snows are deep and enemies are hard at heel. 

The big lynx in the middle was the mother ; the four 
other lynxes were her cubs ; and they held together 
now, partly that their imperfect education might be 
finished under her own eyes, but chiefly that in the 
hungry winter days they might combine their powers 
and hunt more systematically, and pull down, if need be, 
the larger animals that might defy them individually. 

As she crossed the fresh trail of the bull moose the 
old mother lynx thrust her big head into it for a long 
sniff. The line closed up instantly and each lynx 
stood like a statue, his blunt nose down into a reeking 
hoof mark, studying through dull senses what it was 
that had just passed. For Upweekis has a poor nose, 



When Upweekis Goes Hunting 69 

and never quite knows whether to believe or distrust 
its report. The old lynx swung her head up and down 
the line of her motionless cubs ; then with a ferocious 
snarl curling under her whiskers she pushed forward 
again. A score of starving lynxes all together would 
scarcely follow a bull of that stride and power. Only 
the smell of blood would drag them unwillingly along 
such a trail ; and even then, if they overtook the author 
of it, they would only squat around him in a fierce solemn 
circle, yawning hungrily and hoping he would die. 
Now, somewhere just ahead, easier game was hiding 
at the end of a trail that they could follow easily with 
their eyes. An unvoiced command seemed to run up 
and down the line of waiting cubs. Each thrust his head 
out at the same instant and the silent march went on. 
When the last of the line had glided out of sight 
among the bushes of the point below, I ran swiftly 
through the woods, making no noise in the soft snow, 
and crouched motionless under the spruces on the 
lower side of the point, hoping to see the cunning 
hunters again. There was but a moment to wait. 
From under a bending evergreen tip Moktaques 
leaped out and went flying across the open for the 
next wooded point. Close behind him sounded a 
snarl, and with a terrific rush as she sighted the 
game the old lynx burst out, calling savagely to her 



yo A Little Brother to the Bear 

line of hunters to close in. Like the blast of a squall 
they came, stretching out in enormous bounds and 
closing in from either end so as to cut off the circling 
run of the flying game. In a flash the two ends of the 
line had met and whirled in sharply ; in another flash 
Moktaques was crouching close in the snow in the 
center of a fierce circle that rolled in upon him like a 
whirlwind. As the smallest lynx leaped for his game 
an electric shock seemed to touch the motionless hare. 
He shot forward as if galvanized, leaping high over the 
crouching terror before him, striving to break out of 
the terrible circle. Then the lynx over whose head he 
passed leaped straight up, caught the flying creature 
fairly in his great paws, fell over backwards, and was 
covered in an instant by the other lynxes that hurled 
themselves upon him like furies, snapping and clawing 
ferociously at the mouthful which he had pulled down 
at the very moment of its escape. 

There was an appalling scrimmage for a moment; 
then, before I could fairly rub my eyes, the hare had 
vanished utterly, and a savage ring of lynxes were 
licking their chops hungrily, glaring and growling at 
each other to see which it was that had gotten the 
biggest mouthful. 

When they disappeared at last, slinking away in a 
long line under the edge of the barren, I took up the 



When Upweekis Goes Hunting 71 

back track to see how they had been hunting. For a 
full mile, straight back toward my camp, I followed the 
tracks and read the record of as keen a bit of bush- 
beating as was ever seen in the woods. They had 
swept along all that distance in an almost perfect line, 
starting every living thing that lay athwart their path. 
Here it was a ruffed grouse that one had jumped for 
and missed, as the startled bird whirred away into the 
gloom. There one had climbed a tree and shaken 
something off into the snow, where the others licked 
up every morsel so clean that I could not tell what the 
unfortunate creature was; but a curious bit of savage 
daring was manifest, for the lynx that had gone up 
the tree after the game had hurled himself down like 
a catapult, leaving a huge hole in the snow, so as to 
be in at the death before his savage fellows, which had 
come flying in with great bounds, should have eaten 
everything and left not even a smell for his own share. 
And there, at last, at the very end of the line, another 
hare had been started and, running in a short circle, 
as hares often do, had been met and seized by the fourth 
lynx as the long line swung in swiftly to head him off. 
Years later, and miles away on the Renous barrens, 
I saw another and more wonderful bit of the same keen 
hunting. From a ridge above a small barren I saw a 
herd of caribou acting strangely and went down to 



72 A Little Brother to the Bear 

investigate. As I reached the fringe of thick bushes 
that lined the open I saw the caribou cluster excitedly 
about the base of a big rock across the barren, not 
more than two hundred yards away. Something was 
there, evidently, which excited their curiosity, — and 
caribou are the most inquisitive creatures, at times, in 
all the woods, — but I had to study the rock sharply 
through my field-glasses before I made out the round 
fierce head of a big lynx pressed flat against the gray 
stone. One side of the rock was almost perpendicu- 
lar, rising sheer some fifteen or twenty feet above the 
plain; the other side slanted off less abruptly toward 
the woods; and the big lynx, which had probably 
scrambled up from the woods to spy on the caribou, 
was now hanging half over the edge of rock, swaying 
his savage head from side to side and stretching one 
wide paw after another at the animals beneath. 

The caribou were getting more excited and curious 
every moment. Caribou are like turkeys ; when they 
see some new thing they must die or find out about 
it. Now they were spreading and closing their ranks, 
wavering back and forth, stretching ears and noses at 
the queer thing on the rock, but drawing nearer and 
nearer with every change. 

Suddenly the lynx jumped, not at the caribou, for 
they were still too far away, but high in the air with 



When Upweekis Goes Hunting 73 

paws outspread. He came down in a flurry of snow, 
whirled round and round as if bewitched, then van- 
ished silently in two great jumps into the shelter of 
the nearest evergreens. 

The caribou broke wildly at the strange sight, but 
turned after a startled bound or two to see what it was 
that had frightened them. There was nothing in sight, 
and like a flock of foolish sheep they came timidly back, 
nosing the snow and stretching their ears at the rock 
again ; for there at the top was the big lynx, swinging 
his round head from side to side as before, and reach- 
ing his paws alternately at the herd, as if to show them 
how broad and fine they were. 

Slowly the little herd neared the rock and the lynx 
drew back, as if to lure them on. They were full of 
burning curiosity, but they had seen one spring, at 
least, and measured its power, and so kept at a respect- 
ful distance. Then one young caribou left the others 
and went nosing along the edge of the woods to find 
the trail of the queer thing, or get to leeward of the 
rock, and so find out by smell — which is the only 
sure sense that a caribou possesses — what it was all 
about. A wind seemed to stir a dried tuft of grass on 
the summit of the great rock. I put my glasses upon 
it instantly, then caught my breath in suppressed excite- 
ment as I made out the tufted ears of two or three other 



74 A Little Brother to the Bear 

lynxes crouching flat on their high tower, out of sight 
of the foolish herd, but watching every movement with 
fierce, yellow, unblinking eyes. 

The young caribou found the trail, put his nose 
down into it, then started cautiously back toward the 
rock to nose the other hole in the snow and be sure 
that it smelled just like the first one. Up on the rock 
the big lynx drew further back ; the herd pressed close, 
raising their heads high to see what he was doing ; and 
the young caribou stole up and put his nose down 
into the trail again. Then three living catapults shot 
over the high rim of the rock and fell upon him. Like 
a flash the big lynx was on his feet, drawing himself 
up to his full height and hurling a savage screech of 
exultation after the flying herd. Then he, too, shot 
over the rock, fell fair on the neck of the struggling 
young caribou, and bore him down into the snow. 

Upweekis is a stupid fellow. He will poke his head 
into a noose as foolishly as any rabbit, and then he will 
fight with the pole at the other end of the noose until 
he chokes himself. But no one could follow that trail 
in the snow without a growing respect for the shadow v 
creature of the big round tracks that wander, wander 
everywhere through the winter woods, and without 
wondering intensely in what kind of savage school 
Mother Upweekis trains her little ones. 




DUNK the Fat One, as Simmo calls him, 
came out of his winter den the morning 
after the Reverend James had stirred the 
sod of his first flower bed. It was early 
April, and the first smell of spring was in the air — 
that subtle call of Mother Earth to her drowsy children 
to awake and come out and do things. The Reverend 
James felt the call in his nose and, remembering his 
boyhood, as we all do at the smell of spring, resolved 
to go fishing after he had finished his morning paper. 
His wife felt it, went to the door, took a long breath 
and cried, " Is n't this just glorious ! " Then she 
grabbed a trowel— for when a man must off to the 
brook for his first trout, a woman, by the same inner 
compulsion, must dig in the earth — and started for 

75 



j6 A Little Brother to the Bear 

the flower bed. A moment later her excited call came 
floating in through the open window. 

" Ja-a-a-a-mes ? James ! " — the first call with a long 
up slide, the second more peremptory — " what in the 
world did you plant in this flower bed ? " 

" Why," said the Reverend James, peering quiz- 
zically over the rim of his spectacles at the open 
window, " why, I thought I planted portulaca seed." 

" Then come out here and see what 's come up," 
ordered his wife; and the surprised old gentleman 
came hurriedly to the door to blink in astonishment 
at three fat toads, which were also blinking in the 
warm sunshine, and a huge mud-turtle that was 
sprawling and hissing indignantly in a great hole 
in the middle of his flower bed. 

A sly, whimsical twinkle was under the old minister's 
spectacles as he regarded the queer crop that had come 
up overnight. " Whatsoever a man soweth, whatsoever 
a man soweth," he quoted softly to himself, eying the 
three toads askance, and poking the big turtle inquisi- 
tively, but snapping his hand back at sight and sound 
of the hooked beak and the fierce hissing. Then, be- 
cause his library contained no book of exegesis equal 
to the occasion, he caught a small boy, who was pass- 
ing on his way to school, and sent him off post-haste 
to my rooms to find out what it was all about. 



K'dunk the Fat One Jj 

Now the three fat toads had also smelled the spring 
down in a soft spot under the lawn, whither, in the 
previous autumn, they had burrowed for their winter 
sleep. When the Reverend James stirred the sod, 
the warm sun thawed them out and brought them the 
spring's message, and they scrambled up to the surface 
promptly, as full of new life as if they had not been 
frozen into insensible clods for the past six months. 
As for the big turtle, the smell of the fresh earth had 
probably brought her up from the neighboring pond 
to search out a nest for herself where she might lay 
her eggs. Finding the soft warm earth of the portu- 
laca bed, she had squirmed and twisted her way down 
into it, the loose earth tumbling in on her and hiding 
her as she went down. 

When the sharp feminine eyes swept over the 
flower bed they detected at once the hollow in the 
middle, showing careless workmanship on the part 
of somebody. " That hole must be filled up," promptly 
declared Mrs. James ; but first, woman-like, she thrust 
her trowel deep into it. "Aha! a rock — careless 
man," she gave judgment, and took another jab and a 
two-handed heave at the hard object. Whereupon out 
came the big mud-turtle, scrambling, hissing, protest- 
ing with beak and claw against being driven out of the 
best nest she had ever found so early in the season. 



J 8 A Little Brother to the Bear 

That night there were curious sounds in the grass 
and dead leaves — rustlings and croakings and low 
husky trills, as the toads came hopping briskly by twos 
and threes down to the pond. From every direction, 
from garden and lawn and wood and old stone wall, 
they came, croaking and trilling through the quiet twi- 
light, and hopping high with delight at the first smell 
of water. Down the banks they came, sliding, rolling, 
tumbling end over end, — any way to get down quickly, 
— landing at last with glad splashings and croakings 
in the warm shallows, where they promptly took to 
biting and clawing and absurd little wrestling bouts ; 
which is the toad's way of settling his disputes and 
taking his own mate away from the other fellows. 

Two or three days they stayed in the pond, filling 
the air with gurgling croaks and filling the water with 
endless strings of gelatine-coated eggs — enough to 
fill the whole pond banks-full of pollywogs, did not 
Mother Nature step in and mercifully dispose of ninety- 
nine per cent of them within a few days of hatching, 
and set the rest of them to eating each other industri- 
ously as they grew, till every pollywog that was left 
might truthfully sing with the cannibalistic mariner: 

Oh, I am the cook and the captain bold 

And the mate of the Nancy brig, 
The bo'sn tight and the midshipmite 

And the crew of the captain's gig. 



K'dunk the Fat One 79 

For every pollywog represented in his proper person 
some hundred or more of his fellow-pollywogs that he 
had eaten in the course of his development. But long 
before that time the toads had left the pond, scattering 
to the four winds whence they had come, caring not 
now what became of their offspring. It was then that 
K'dunk the Fat One came back to the portulaca bed. 

Mrs. James found him there the next morning — a 
big, warty gray toad with a broad grin and a fat belly 
and an eye like a jewel — blinking sleepily after his 
night's hunting. " Mercy ! there 's that awful toad 
again. I hope " — with a cautious glance all round 
— "I hope he has n't brought the turtle with him." 
She gave him a prod and a flip with the trowel to 
get him out of the flower bed, whereupon K'dunk 
scrambled into his hole under an overhanging sod and 
refused to come out, spite of tentative pokes of the 
trowel in a hand that was altogether too tender to 
hurt him. And there he stayed, waging his silent 
warfare against the trowel, until I chanced along and 
persuaded the good lady that she was trying to drive 
away the very best friend that her flowers could 
possibly have. Then K'dunk settled down in peace, 
and we all took to watching him. 

His first care was to make a few hiding holes here 
and there in the garden. Most of these were mere 



80 A Little Brother to the Bear 

hollows in the soft earth, where K'dunk would crouch 
with eyes shut tight whenever his enemies were near. 
His color changed rapidly till it was the same general 
hue as his surroundings, so that, when he lay quiet 
and shut his bright eyes in one of his numerous hol- 
lows, it was almost impossible to find him. But after 
he had been worried two or three times by the house- 
dog — a fat, wheezy little pug that always grew excited 
when K'dunk began to hop about in the twilight but 
that could never bark himself up to the point of touch- 
ing the clammy thing with his nose — he dug other 
holes, under the sod banks, or beside a rock, where 
Grunt, the pug, could not bother him without getting 
too much out of breath. 

We made friends with him at first by scratching 
his back with a stick, at which pleasant operation he 
would swell and grunt with satisfaction. But you could 
never tell when he would get enough, or at what mo- 
ment he would feel his dignity touched in a tender 
spot and go hopping off to the garden in high dudgeon. 
Then we fed him flies and bits of tender meat, which 
we would wiggle with a bit of grass to make them 
seem alive. At the same time we whistled a certain 
call to teach him when his supper was ready. Then, 
finally, by gentle handlings and pettings he grew quite 
tame, and at the sound of the whistle would scramble 



K'dunk the Fat One 81 

out from under the door-step, where he lived by day, and 
hop briskly in our direction to be fed and played with. 

Though K'dunk had many interesting traits, which 
we discovered with amazement as the summer pro- 
gressed and we grew better acquainted, I think that 
his feeding ways and tricks were the source of our 
most constant delight and wonder. Just to see him 
stalk a fly filled one with something of the tense excite- 
ment of a deer hunt. As he sat by a stump or clod 
in the fading light, some belated fly or early night-bug 
would light on the ground in front of him. Instantly 
the jewel eye in K'dunk's head would begin to flash 
and sparkle. He would crouch down and creep nearer, 
toeing in like a duck, slower and slower, one funny 
little paw brushing cautiously by the other, with all 
the stealth and caution of a cat stalking a chipmunk 
on the wall. Then, as he neared his game, there would 
be a bright flash of the jewel ; a red streak shot through 
the air, so quick that your eye could not follow it, and 
the fly would disappear. Whereupon K'dunk would 
gulp something down, closing his eyes solemnly as he 
did so, as if he were saying grace, or as if, somehow, 
closing his eyes to all outward things made the morsel 
taste better. 

The red streak, of course, was K'dunk's tongue, 
wherein lies the secret of his hunting. It is attached 



82 A Little Brother to the Bear 

at the outer rim of his mouth, and folds back in his 
throat. The inner end is broad and soft and sticky, 
and he snaps it out and back quick as a wink or a 
lizard. Whatever luckless insect the tongue touches 
is done with all bothering of our humanity. The 
sticky tongue snaps him up and back into K'dunk's 
wide mouth before he has time to spread a wing or 
even to think what is the matter with him. 

Once I saw him stalk a grasshopper, a big lively 
green fellow that, in a particularly long jump, had 
come out of the protecting grass and landed on the 
brown earth directly in front of where K'dunk was 
catching the flies that were coming in a steady stream 
to a bait that I had put out for them. Instantly 
K'dunk turned his attention from the flies to the 
larger game. Just as his tongue shot out the grass- 
hopper, growing suspicious, jumped for cover. The 
soft tongue missed him by a hair, but struck one of 
his trailing legs and knocked him aside. In an instant 
K'dunk was after him again, his legs scrambling des- 
perately, his eyes blazing, and his tongue shooting in 
and out like a streak of flame. Just as the grasshop- 
per rose in a hard jump the tongue hit him, and I saw 
no more. But K'dunk's gulp was bigger and his eyes 
were closed for a longer period than usual, and there 
was a loud protesting rustle in his throat as the 




'= 



"The soft tongue struck one of his 
trailing legs" 



K'dunk the Fat One 83 

grasshopper's long legs went kicking down the road 
that has no turning. 

A big caterpillar that I found and brought to 
K'dunk, one day, afforded us all another field for 
rare observation. The caterpillar was a hairy fellow, 
bristling with stiff spines, and I doubted that the 
tongue had enough mucilage on it to stick to him. 
But K'dunk had no such doubts. His tongue flew 
out and his eyes closed solemnly. At the same time 
I saw the caterpillar shrink himself together and stick 
his spines out stiffer than ever. Then a curious thing 
came out, namely, that K'dunk's mouth is so big and 
his game is usually so small that he cannot taste his 
morsel ; he just swallows mechanically, as if he were 
so used to catching his game that it never occurred to 
him that he could miss. When he opened his eyes 
and saw the caterpillar in the same place, he thought, 
evidently, that it was another one which had come in 
mysteriously on wings, as the flies were coming to my 
bait. Again his tongue shot out, and his eyes closed 
in a swallow of delight. But there in front of him, as 
his eyes opened, was another caterpillar. Such per- 
fect harmony of supply and demand was never known 
to a toad before. 

Again and again his tongue shot out, and each shot 
was followed by a blink and a gulp. All the while 



84 A Little Brother to the Bear 

that he kept up this rapid shooting he thought he was 
getting fresh caterpillars; and all the while the hairy 
fellow was shrinking closer and closer together and 
sticking his spines out like a porcupine. But he was 
getting more mucilage on him at every shot. " That 
caterpillar is getting too stuck-up to live," presently 
said little Johnnie, who was watching the game with 
me ; and at the word a hairy ball shot into the wide 
mouth that was yawning for him, and K'dunk went 
back to his fly-catching. 

It is probably this lack of taste on K'dunk's part 
that accounts for the astonishing variety of his food. 
Nothing in the shape of an insect seemed to come 
amiss to him. Flies, wasps, crickets, caterpillars, 
doodle-bugs, and beetles of every description were all 
treated alike to the same red flash of his tongue and 
the blinking gulp. A half-dozen boys and girls, who 
were watching the queer pet with me, were put to 
their wits' end to find something that he would not 
eat. One boy, who picked huckleberries, brought in 
three or four of the disagreeable little bugs, known 
without a name by every country boy, that have the 
skunk habit of emitting overpowering odors when dis- 
turbed, thinking that he had found a poser for our 
pet ; but K'dunk gobbled them up as if they had been 
set before him as a relish to tickle his appetite. 



K'dunk the Fat One 85 

Another brought potato bugs ; but these too were fish 
for K'dunk's net. Then a third boy, who had charge 
of a kitchen garden, went away wagging his head and 
saying that he had just picked something that no 
living thing would eat. When he came back he had 
a horse-radish bottle that swarmed with squash-bugs, 
twenty or thirty of the vile-smelling things, which 
he dumped out on the ground and stirred up with 
a stick. 

Somebody ran and brought K'dunk from one of his 
hiding-places and set him down on the ground in front 
of the squirming mess. For a moment he seemed to 
be eying his proposition with astonishment. Then he 
crouched down and the swift red tongue-play began. 
In four minutes, by my watch, every squash-bug that 
stirred had disappeared, and K'dunk finished the 
others as fast as we could wiggle them with a straw 
to make them seem alive. 

We gave up trying to beat him on variety after 
that, and settled down to the apparently simple task 
of trying to find out how many insects he could eat 
before calling halt. But even here K'dunk was too 
much for us ; we never, singly or all together, reached 
the limit of his appetite. Once we fed him ninety 
rose-bugs without stopping. Another afternoon, when 
three boys appeared at the same hour, we put our 



86 A Little Brother to the Bear 

catch together, a varied assortment of flies, bugs, and 
creeping things, a hundred and sixty-four head all 
told. Before dark K'dunk had eaten them all, and 
went hopping off to the garden on his night's hunting 

— as if he had not already done enough to prove him- 
self our friend for the entire summer. 

Later we adopted a different plan and made the 
game come to K'dunk on its own wings, instead of 
running all over creation ourselves to catch it for him. 
Near the barn was a neglected drain where the flies 
were numerous enough to warn us to look after our 
sanitation more zealously. Here I built a little cage 
of wire netting, in which I placed a dead rat and some 
scraps from the table. When the midday sun found 
them and made them odorous, big flies began to pour 
in, with the loud buzzing which seems to be a signal to 
their fellows ; for in ordinary flight the same flies are 
almost noiseless. Once, however, they find a bit of 
carrion fit for their eggs, they buzz about loudly every 
few minutes, and other flies hear them; whereupon 
their quiet flight changes to a loud buzzing. So the 
news spreads — at least this seems to help the matter 

— and flies pour in from every direction. 

At three o'clock I brought K'dunk from his medita- 
tions under the door-step and set him down in the 
cage, screening him with a big rhubarb leaf so that 



K'dunk the Fat One Sy 

the sun would not dazzle his eyes too much. Then 
I took out my watch and sat down on a rock to count. 

In the first ten minutes K'dunk got barely a dozen 
flies. They were wary of him in the bright light, and 
he was not yet waked up to the occasion. Then he 
crouched down between the rat and the scraps, worked 
a hollow for himself where he could turn without being 
noticed, and the red tongue-play began in earnest. In ' 
the next half-hour he got sixty-six flies, an average of 
over two a minute. In an hour his record was a hun- 
dred and ten ; and before I left him he had added 
two dozen more to the score of our enemies. Then 
the flies ceased coming, as the air grew cool, and I 
carried him back to the door-step. But that night, 
later than usual, he was off to the garden again to 
keep up his splendid work. 

When the summer glow-worms came (lightning- 
bugs, the boys called them) we saw another curious 
and pretty bit of hunting. One night, as we sat on 
the porch in the soft twilight, I saw the first lightning- 
bug glowing in the grass, and went to catch it as a 
jewel for a lady's hair. As I reached down my hand 
under a bush, the glow suddenly disappeared, and I 
put my fingers on K'dunk instead. He, too, had seen 
the glow and had instantly adopted jacking as his 
mode of hunting. 



88 A Little Brother to the Bear 

Later I caught a lightning-bug and put it in a tiny- 
bottle, and dropped it in front of K'dunk as he started 
across the lawn in the late twilight. He saw the glow 
through the glass and took a shot at it promptly. As 
with the hairy caterpillar, he shut his eyes as he 
gulped down the imaginary morsel, and when he 
opened them again there was another lightning-bug 
glowing in the grass just where the first had been. 
So he kept the tiny bottle jumping about the lawn at 
the repeated laps of his tongue, blinking and swallow- 
ing betweenwhiles, until the glow-worm, made dizzy 
perhaps by the topsy-turvy play of his strange cage, 
folded his wings and hid his little light. Where- 
upon K'dunk hopped away, thinking, no doubt, in his 
own way, that while lightning-bugs were unusually 
thick that night and furnished the prettiest kind of 
hunting, they were very poor satisfaction to a hungry 
stomach, — not to be compared with what he could 
get by jumping up at the insects that hid on the 
under side of the leaves on every plant in the garden. 

It needed no words of mine by this time to con- 
vince the good Mrs. James that K'dunk was her friend. 
Indeed she paid a small boy ten cents apiece for a 
half-dozen toads to turn loose about the premises to 
help K'dunk in his excellent work. And the garden 
flourished as never before, thanks to the humble little 



K'dunk the Fat One 89 

helpers. But K'dunk's virtues were more than utilita- 
rian ; he was full of unexpected things that kept us all 
constantly watching with delight to see what would 
happen next. As I said, he soon learned to come to 
the call ; but more than that, he was fond of music. . 
If you whistled a little tune softly, he would stay per- 
fectly still until you finished before going off on his 
night's hunting. Then, if you changed the tune, or 
whistled discordantly, he would hop away as if he had 
no further use for you. 

Sometimes, at night, a few young people would 
gather on the porch and sing together, — a proceed- 
ing which often tolled K'dunk out from under the 
door-step, and which, on one occasion, brought him 
hopping hurriedly back from the garden, whither he 
had gone an hour before to hunt his supper. Quiet 
hymns he seemed to like, for he always kept still as 
a worshiper, — which pleased the Reverend James 
immensely, — but "rag-time" music he detested, if 
one could judge by his actions and by the unmistak- 
able way he had of turning his back upon what did 
not appeal to him or touch his queer fancy. 

One evening, a young girl with a very sweet natural 
voice was singing by an open window on the porch. 
She was singing for the old folks' pleasure, that night, 
some old simple melodies that they liked best. Just 



90 A Little Brother to the Bear 

within the window the piano was playing a soft 
accompaniment. A stir in the grass attracted my 
attention, and there was K'dunk trying in vain to climb 
up the step. I called Mrs. James' attention quietly to 
the queer guest, and then lifted K'dunk gently to the 
piazza. There he followed along the rail until he 
was close beside the singer, where he sat perfectly 
still, listening intently as long as she sang. Nor was 
she conscious that night of this least one among her 
hearers. 

Two or three times this happened in the course of 
the summer. The girl 's voice seemed to have a fas- 
cination for our homely little pet, for at the first sweet 
notes he would scramble out from his hiding and try 
to climb the steps. When I lifted him to the porch he 
would hop along till close beside the singer, where he 
would sit, all quietness and appreciation, as long as she 
sang. Then, one night when he had sat humble and 
attentive at her feet through two songs, a tenor who 
studied in New York, and who sometimes gave con- 
certs, was invited to sing. He responded promptly 
and atrociously with "O Hully Gee," — which was 
not the name of the thing, but only the academy 
boys' version of a once popular love-song. Had 
K'dunk been a German choir-leader, he could not 
have so promptly and perfectly expressed his opinion 



K'dunk the Fat One 91 

of the wretched twaddle. It was not the fool words, 
which fortunately he could not understand, nor yet 
the wretched tingle-tangle music, which was past 
praying for, but rather the voice itself with its forced 
unnatural quality so often affected by tenors. At the 
first strident notes K'dunk grew uneasy. Then he 
scrambled to the edge of the porch and fell off head- 
long in his haste to get down and away from the 
soul-disturbing performance. 

The sudden flight almost caused a panic and an 
awful breach of hospitality among the few who were 
quietly watching things. To cover an irrepressible 
chuckle I slipped away after K'dunk, who scrambled 
clear to the pie-plant patch before he stopped hopping. 
As I went I heard the gentle Mrs. James, soul of good- 
ness and hospitality, coughing violently into her hand- 
kerchief, as if a rude draught had struck her sensitive 
throat ; but it sounded to me more like a squirrel that 
I once heard snickering inside of a hollow pumpkin. 
However, the tenor sang on, and all was well. K'dunk 
meanwhile was engaged in the better task of ridding 
the garden of noxious bugs, sitting up at times, in a 
funny way he had, and scratching the place where his 
ear should be. 

It was soon after this, when we all loved K'dunk 
better than ever, that the most astonishing bit of his 



92 A Little Brother to the Bear 

queer life came to the surface. Unlike the higher 
orders of animals, K'dunk receives no training what- 
ever from his elders. The lower orders live so simple 
a life that instinct is enough for them ; and so Nature, 
who can be provident at times, as well as wasteful, 
omits the superfluous bother of teaching them. But 
many things he did before our eyes for which instinct 
could never account, and many difficulties arose for 
which innate knowledge was not sufficient ; and then 
we saw his poor dull wits at work against the unex- 
pected problems of the universe. 

As the summer grew hotter and hotter K'dunk left 
the door-step and made for himself a better den. All 
toads do this in the scorching days — hollow out a 
retreat under a sod or root or rotten stump, and 
drowse there in its cool damp shade while the sun 
blisters overhead. Just in front of the door-step some 
broad flagstones extended across the lawn to the side- 
walk. The frosts of many winters had forced them 
apart, some more and some less, and a ribbon of 
green grass now showed between many pairs of the 
stones. Where the ribbon was widest K'dunk found 
out, in some way, that the thin sod covered a hollow 
underneath, and he worked at this until the sod gave 
way and he tumbled into a roomy cavern under one 
of the flagstones. Here it was always cool, and he 



K'dunk the Fat One 93 

abandoned the door-step forthwith, sleeping through 
the drowsy August days in the better place that his 
wits had discovered. 

Now K'dunk, with good hunting in the garden and 
with much artificial feeding at our hands, grew fatter 
and fatter. At times when he came hopping home 
in the morning, swelled out enormously with the 
uncounted insects that he had eaten, he found the 
space between the flagstones uncomfortably narrow. 
Other toads have the same difficulty and, to avoid it, 
simply scratch the entrance to their dens a little wider; 
but dig and push as he would, K'dunk could not budge 
the flagstones. 

He scratched a longer entrance after his first hard 
squeezing, but that did no good; the doorway was 
still uncomfortably narrow, and he often reminded 
me, going into his house, of a very fat and pompous 
man trying to squeeze through a turnstile, tugging 
and pushing and tumbling through with a grunt at 
last, and turning to eye the invention indignantly. 
To get out of his den was easy, for during the long 
day he had digested his dinner and was thin again ; 
but how to get in comfortably in the morning with a 
full stomach, — that was the question. 

One morning I saw him come out of the garden, 
and I knew instantly that he had more trouble ahead. 



94 A Little Brother to the Bear 

He had found some rich nests of bugs that night and 
had eaten enormously ; his " fair round body " dragged 
along the grass as he crawled rather than hopped to 
his doorway, and his one desire seemed to be to tumble 
into his den drowsily and go to sleep. But alas ! he 
could not get in. He had reached the limit at last. 

First he put his head and shoulders through, and by 
pulling at the under side of the flagstones tried to 
hitch and coax his way in. All in vain ! His fat 
body caught between the obstinate flags and only 
wedged tighter and tighter. The bulging part with- 
out was so much bigger than the part within that he 
must have given it up at a glance, could he only have 
seen himself. But he worked away with wonderful 
patience till he knew it was of no use, w r hen he 
pushed himself out again and sat looking into his 
inhospitable doorway, blinking and tousled and all 
covered with dust and grass roots. As he sat he kept 
scratching the place where his ear should be, as if he 
were thinking. 

In a moment or two, as if he had solved the prob- 
lem, he turned around and hitched his hind legs into 
the hole. He was going in backwards, but carefully, 
awkwardly, as if he were not used to it. This, however, 
was worse than the other, for his obstinate belly only 
wedged the tighter and, with a paw down on either 



K'dunk the Fat One 95 

side of him, every push lifted him up instead of pull- 
ing him down. He gave up quicker than before, 
because his head was out now and he could see better 
how he was progressing. At last he lay down, as if 
he had solved the problem, and tried to squirm 
through his long doorway lengthwise. This was 
better. He could get either his hind legs or his head 
and shoulders through ; but, like the buckets in the well, 
when one end was down the other end was up, and 
still his fat, obstinate body refused to go through with 
the rest. Still he seemed to be making progress, for 
every teeter of head and legs worked his uncom- 
fortable dinner into better shape. At the end he 
wedged himself too tight, and there was a harder 
scramble to get out than there had been to get in. By 
a desperate push and kick he freed himself at last and 
sat, all tousled again, blinking into his doorway, medi- 
tating. 

Suddenly he turned and lowered his hind legs into 
the hole. He was more careful this time, afraid of 
being caught. When he had dropped through as far 
as he could go, he sat very still for some moments, 
supporting himself with a paw on either side. His 
jaws opened slowly — and full of wonder at a curious 
twitching motion he was making, I crept near on 
hands and knees and looked down into his wide-open 



96 A Little Brother to the Bear 

mouth. There was his dinner, all sorts of flies and 
night-bugs, coming up little by little and being held in 
his great mouth as in a basket, while his stomach 
worked below and sent up supplies to relieve the 
pressure. 

Slowly he slipped down as the stones began to lose 
their hard grip. A squirm, a twist, a comfortable roll 
of his stomach, a sudden jounce — and the thing was 
done. K'dunk was resting with a paw on either flag- 
stone, his body safe below and his mouth, still wide 
open above, holding its precious contents, like an old- 
fashioned valise that had burst open. Then he swal- 
lowed his disturbed dinner down again in big gulps, 
and with a last scramble disappeared into his cool den. 

That night he did not come out, but the second 
night he was busy in the garden as usual. To our 
deep regret he deserted both the door-step and the 
den with its narrow opening under the flagstones. 
It may be that in his own way he had pondered the 
problem of what might have become of him had the 
owl been after him when he came home that morning ; 
for when I found him again he was safe under the 
hollow roots of an old apple-tree, where the entrance 
was wide enough to tumble in quickly, however much 
he had eaten. And there he stayed by day as long as 
I kept tabs on him. 



K'dunk the Fat One 97 

There was but one more interesting trait that I dis- 
covered in the last days of the summer, and that was 
his keenness in finding the best hunting-grounds. Just 
behind his den in the old apple-tree was a stone wall, 
under which insects of all kinds were plenty. K'dunk's 
den was on the east side, so that the sun as it set 
threw the cool shade of the wall over the place and 
brought our pet out earlier than was his wont. In 
some way he found out that the west side of the wall 
caught and held the sun's last rays, and that flies and 
all sorts of insects would light or crawl on the hot 
stones to get warm in the late afternoon. He made a 
tunnel for himself under the wall, just behind his den, 
and would lie close beside a certain gray stone on the 
west side, his gray color hiding him perfectly, picking 
off the flies as they lit with the quickness and certainty 
of a lizard. When bugs and insects crawled out of 
their holes to sun themselves awhile on a warm stone, 
K'dunk, whose eye ranged up and down over his hunt- 
ing-ground, would lie still until they settled comfort- 
ably, and would then creep cautiously within range 
and snap them up with a flash of his tongue that the 
eye could scarcely follow. In a dozen afternoons, 
watching him there, I never saw him miss a single 
shot, while the number of flies and insects he destroyed 
must have reached up into the hundreds. 



98 A Little Brother to the Bear 

In the same field four or five cows were pastured, 
and on pleasant days they were milked out of doors 
instead of being driven into the barn. Now those 
who have watched cows at milking time have probably 
noted how the flies swarm on their legs, clustering 
thickly above the hoofs, where the switching of a 
nervous tail cannot disturb them. K'dunk had noted 
it too, and often during the milking, when the cows 
were quiet, he would approach a certain animal out of 
the herd, creep up on one hoof after another and snap 
off every fly within reach. Then he would jump for 
the highest ones, hitting them almost invariably, and 
tumble off on his back after a successful shot. But in 
a moment he had scrambled back on a hoof again and 
was waiting for the next fly to light within range. 
The most curious part of it all was that he attached 
himself to one cow, and would seek her out of the 
herd wherever she was being milked. He never, so 
far as I observed, went near any of the others ; and 
the cow after a time seemed to recognize the toad as 
a friend, and would often stand still after being milked 
as long as K'dunk remained perched on one of her 
hoofs. 

As the summer waned and green things disappeared 
from the garden he deserted that also, going wider 
and wider afield in his night's hunting. He grew 



K'dunk the Fat One 99 

wilder, too, as all things do in the autumn days, till at 
last no whistle, however loud, would bring him back. 
Whether the owl caught him, or whether he still looks 
forward to the long life that Nature gives to the toads, 
I do not know ; but under the edge of the portulaca 
bed, as I write, is a suspicious hollow that the frosts 
and snows have not quite concealed. I shall watch 
that in the spring with more than common interest to 
know whether K'dunk the Fat One remembers his 
old friends. 



LtfG. 




m i 



'NE day, in a long tramp 
through the heavy forest *#5ll 
that borders the Little Southwest W 
River, I came upon a dim old road 
that had been bushed the previous winter and, having 
nothing better to do, followed it to see whither it 
would lead me. Other feet than mine had recently 
gone on the same errand, for every soft spot in the 
earth, every moldering log and patch of swamp moss 
and muddy place beside the brook, had deep footprints 
and claw marks to tell me that Mooween the bear had 
gone back and forth many times over the same trail. 
Then I knew what I should find at the other end of 
it, and was not at all surprised when it led me to the 
open yard of a big lumber camp beside the river. 



Mooween s Den 101 

There is always a fascination in such places, where 
men have lived their simple lives in the heart of the 
woods, shut out from all the rest of the world during 
the long winter ; so I began to prowl quietly about the 
shanties to see what I could find. The door of the 
low stable swung invitingly open, but it was a dark, 
musty, ill-smelling place now, though cosy enough in 
winter, and only the porcupines had invaded it. I left 
it after a glance and came round to the men's shanty. 

The door of this was firmly locked ; but a big hole 
had been torn in the roof by bears, and I crawled in 
by that entrance. Mooween had been here many times 
ahead of me. Every corner of the big room, the bunks 
and the cupboards and even the stove, had been ran- 
sacked from one end to the other; and the strong, 
doggy smell of a bear was everywhere, showing how 
recently he had searched the place. Here, in a cor- 
ner, a large tin box had been wrenched open and flour 
was scattered over the floor and deacon-seat, as if a 
whirlwind had struck the place. Mooween was play- 
ful evidently; or perhaps he was mad that the stuff 
for which he had taken so much trouble was too dry 
to eat. The white print of one paw was drawn every- 
where on the floor and walls. This was the paw of a 
little bear, who had undoubtedly come late, and had to 
be content with what the others had left. 



102 A Little Brother to the Bear 

All over the log floor some cask or vessel had been 
rolled about, before the flour was spilled, and I knew 
instantly that I was on the track of the first bear that 
entered, the big fellow that had torn the hole in the 
roof and had then nosed all over the camp without 
disturbing anything until he found what he wanted. 
As the thing was rolled about under his paw the 
contents had been spilled liberally, and Mooween had 
followed it about, lapping up what he found on the 
floor and leaving not a single drop to tell the story ; 
but from the flies that gathered in clusters in every 
sunny spot I knew that the stuff must have been 
sweet — molasses probably — and that Mooween, after 
he had eaten it all, had carried away the pail or jug to 
lick it clean, as bears almost invariably do when they 
sack a lumber camp. 

Other bears had followed him into the camp and 
had found poor pickings. One had thumped open a 
half barrel of pork and sampled the salty contents, and 
then had nosed a pile of old moccasins inquisitively. 
A dozen axes and peaveys had been pulled out of a 
barrel and thrown on the floor, to see if perchance 
they had hidden anything good to eat. Every pot 
and pan in the big cupboard had been taken out and 
given a lap or two to find out what they had cooked 
last; and one bear had stood up on his hind legs and 



Mooweens Den 103 

swept off the contents of a high shelf with a sweep 
of his paw. Altogether the camp had been sacked 
thoroughly, and it was of little use for any other bear 
to search the place. The camp seemed to be waiting 
silently for the lumbermen to come back in the fall 
and set things to rights. 

I crawled back through the hole in the roof and be- 
gan to search the big yard carefully. If Moo ween had 
carried anything outside, it would be found not far 
away ; and there is a keen interest, for me at least, in 
finding anything that the Wood Folk have touched or 
handled. The alder stick that the beaver cut yester- 
day, or the little mud pie that his paws have patted 
smooth ; the knot that the young coons have used as 
a plaything in their den, to beguile the hours when 
their mother was away ; the tree against which two or 
three bears have measured and scratched their height ; 
the log where the grouse drums; the discarded horn 
of a moose; the track of an unknown beast; the old 
den of a lucivee, — in all these things, and a thousand 
more, there is I know not what fascination that draws 
me a mile out of my course just to stand for a moment 
where wild little feet have surely passed and to read 
the silent records they have left behind them. 

In front of the camp door was a huge pile of chips 
where the lumbermen had chopped their wood during 



104 A Little Brother to the Bear 

the long winter. I walked up on this, wondering at 
its huge size and making a great clatter as the chips 
slipped from under me. Suddenly there was a terrify- 
ing rumble at my feet. A bear burst out of the chip 
pile, as if he had been blown up by an explosion, and 
plunged away headlong into the silent woods. 

This was startling enough on a quiet day. I had 
been looking for something that Mooween had left, not 
for Mooween himself. I stood stock still where I was 
on the chip pile, staring after the bear, wondering first 
where he came from, and then wondering what would 
have happened had he been inside the shanty when 
I came in through the roof. Then I came down and 
found the queerest den that ever I have stumbled upon 
in the woods. 

On the north side of the mound a tunnel a couple of 
feet long had been dug by the bear, and the heart of 
the chip pile had been thrown out to make a little 
cave, just big enough for Mooween to lie down in. I 
poked my head into it, and to my astonishment found 
it to be a regular ice house, with snow and ice packed 
in solidly among the chips. I tried the pile in other 
places and found the same conditions everywhere. A 
foot or two beneath the surface the ice remained as 
perfectly preserved as if it were January instead of 
midsummer. Here were shade and coolness such as 



Mooweens Den 105 

no sun could disturb, and in a moment it came to me 
how the queer thing had come about. 

All winter long the lumbermen had chopped their 
fire-wood on the same spot, using axes only, and mak- 
ing an enormous amount of chips and rubbish. When 
heavy snows fell, instead of clearing it away, they 
simply cut more wood on top of it, tramping the snow 
beneath into a solid mass and covering it over with 
fresh chips. So the pile grew, — first a layer of chips, 
then a thick blanket of snow, then more chips and 
snow again, — growing bigger and bigger until in 
April the lumbermen locked their shanty and went out 
on the spring drive of logs. 

When the spring sun melted the snow in the woods 
the big pile remained, settling slowly as the days 
warmed. At midday the top layer of snow would 
melt and trickle down through the chips ; by night it 
would freeze hard, gradually changing the snow with- 
in to soft ice. When all the snow in the woods was 
gone, that in the chip pile remained, kept from melting 
by the thick wooden blankets that covered it ; and 
the longest summer would hardly be sufficient to melt 
it down to the bottom layer, which represented the 
first fall of snow in the previous autumn. 

When I found the spot it was early July. The 
sun was blistering hot overhead, and the flies and 



106 A Little Brother to the Bear 

mosquitoes were out in myriads ; but in Mooween's 
den two or three layers of ice were as yet unmelted. 
The hole was as cold as a refrigerator, and not a fly 
of any kind would stay there for a single second. 

At the inner end of the den' something glimmered 
as my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, and I 
reached in my hand and pulled the thing out. It was 
a stone jug, and I knew instantly what had held the 
molasses that had been spilled on the camp floor. 
Mooween had probably pulled the cork and rolled the 
jug about, lapping up the molasses as it came out. 
When he could get no more he had taken the jug 
under his arm as he climbed through the hole in the 
roof, and kept it now in his cool den to lick it all over 
again for any stray drops that he might have over- 
looked. Perhaps also he found comfort in putting his 
tongue or his nose into the nozzle to smell the sweet- 
ness that he could no longer reach. 

I have found one or two strange winter dens of 
Mooween, and have followed his trail uncounted miles 
through the snow when he had been driven out of one 
hibemacidum and was seeking another in the remote 
fastnesses, making an unending trail with the evident 
intention of tiring out any hunter who should attempt 
to follow him. I have found his bathing pools repeat- 
edly, and watched him in midsummer when he sought 



Mooween s Den 107 

out cool retreats — a muddy eddy in a trout brook 
under the alders, or a mossy hollow under the north side 
of a great sheer ledge — to escape the flies and heat. 
But none of them compare with this lumberman's ice 
house which his wits had appropriated, and which, from 
many signs about the place, he was accustomed to use 
daily for his nap when the sun was hottest ; and none 
of his many queer traits ever appealed to me quite so 
strongly as the humorous cunning which prompted him 
to take the jug with him into his den. It was safe 
there, whether Mooween were at home or not, for no 
bear will ever enter another's den unless the owner 
first show him in ; and while other bears were in the 
hot camp, trying to find a satisfactory bite of salt pork 
and dry flour, Mooween was lying snug in his ice 
house licking the molasses jug that represented his 
own particular share of the plunder. 




jOSKOMENOS the king- 
fisher still burrows in the earth 
like his reptile ancestors; therefore 
the other birds call him outcast and will have nothing 
to do with him. But he cares little for that, being a 
clattering, rattle-headed, self-satisfied fellow, who seems 
to do nothing all day long but fish and eat. As you 
follow him, however, you note with amazement that 
he does some things marvelously well — better indeed 
than any other of the Wood Folk. To locate a fish 
accurately in still water is difficult enough, when one 
thinks of light refraction ; but when the fish is moving, 
and the sun glares down into the pool and the wind 
wrinkles its face into a thousand flashing, changing 

furrows and ridges, — then the bird that can point a 

1 08 



Kingfisher s Kindergarten 109 

bill straight to his fish and hit him fair just behind 
the gills must have more in his head than the usual 
chattering gossip that one hears from him on the 
trout streams. 

This was the lesson that impressed itself upon me 
when I first began to study Koskomenos ; and the 
object of this little sketch, which records those first 
strong impressions, is not to give our kingfisher's color 
or markings or breeding habits — you can get all that 
from the bird books — but to suggest a possible answer 
to the question of how he learns so much, and how he 
teaches his wisdom to the little kingfishers. 

Just below my camp, one summer, was a trout pool. 
Below the trout pool was a shaded minnow basin, a 
kind of storehouse for the pool above, where the trout 
foraged in the early and late twilight, and where, if 
you hooked a red-fin delicately on a fine leader and 
dropped it in from the crotch of an overhanging tree, 
you might sometimes catch a big one. 

Early one morning, while I was sitting in the tree, 
a kingfisher swept up the river and disappeared under 
the opposite bank. He had a nest in there, so cun- 
ningly hidden under an overhanging root. that till then 
I had not discovered it, though I had fished the pool 
and seen the kingfishers clattering about many times. 
They were unusually noisy when I was near, and flew 



no A Little Brother to the Bear 

up-stream over the trout pool with a long, rattling call 
again and again — a ruse, no doubt, to make me think 
that their nest was somewhere far above. 

I watched the nest closely after that, in the intervals 
when I was not fishing, and learned many things to 
fill one with wonder and respect for this unknown, 
clattering outcast of -the wilderness rivers. He has 
devotion for his mate, and feeds her most gallantly 
while she is brooding. He has courage, plenty of it. 
One day, under my very eyes, he drove off a mink and 
almost killed the savage creature. He has well-defined 
fishing regulations and enforces them rigorously, never 
going beyond his limits and permitting no poaching 
on his own minnow pools. He also has fishing lore 
enough in his frowsy head — if one could get it out — 
to make Izaak Walton's discourse like a child's bab- 
ble. Whether the wind be south or northeast, whether 
the day be dull or bright, he knows exactly where the 
little fish will be found, and how to catch them. 

When the young birds came, the most interesting bit 
of Koskomenos' life was manifest. One morning as I 
sat watching, hidden away in the bushes, the mother 
kingfisher put her head out of her hole and looked 
about very anxiously. A big water-snake lay stretched 
along a stranded log on the shore. She pounced upon 
him instantly and drove him out of sight. Just above, 




' He drove off a mink and almost killed 
the savage creature " 



Kingfisher s Kindergarten 1 1 1 

at the foot of the trout pool, a brood of sheldrake were 
croaking and splashing about in the shallows. They 
were harmless, yet the kingfisher rushed upon them, 
clattering and scolding like a fishwife, and harried 
them all away into a quiet bogan. 

On the way back she passed over a frog, a big, sober, 
sleepy fellow, waiting on a lily-pad for his sun-bath. 
Chigwooltz might catch young trout, and even little 
birds as they came to drink, but he would surely never 
molest a brood of kingfishers ; yet the mother, like an 
irate housekeeper flourishing her broom at every cor- 
ner of an unswept room, sounded her rattle loudly and 
dropped on the sleepy frog's head, sending him sput- 
tering and scrambling away into the mud, as if Hawa- 
hak the hawk were after him. Then with another look 
all round to see that the stream was clear, and with a 
warning rattle to any Wood Folk that she might have 
overlooked, she darted into her nest, wiggling her tail 
like a satisfied duck as she disappeared. 

After a moment a wild-eyed young kingfisher put 
his head out of the hole for his first look at the big 
world. A push from behind cut short his contempla- 
tion, and without any fuss whatever he sailed down to 
a dead branch on the other side of the stream. Another 
and another followed in the same way, as if each one 
had been told just what to do and where to go, till 



ii2 A Little Brother to the Bear 

the whole family were sitting a-row, with the rippling 
stream below them and the deep blue heavens and the 
rustling world of woods above. 

That was their first lesson, and their reward was 
near. The male bird had been fishing since daylight ; 
now he began to bring minnows from an eddy where 
he had stored them, and to feed the hungry family and 
assure them, in his own way, that this big world, so 
different from the hole in the bank, was a good place 
to live in, and furnished no end of good things to eat. 

The next lesson was more interesting, the lesson of 
catching fish. The school was a quiet, shallow pool 
with a muddy bottom, against which the fish showed 
clearly, and with a convenient stub leaning over it 
from which to swoop. The old birds had caught a 
score of minnows, killed them, and dropped them here 
and there under the stub. Then they brought the 
young birds, showed them their game, and told them 
by repeated examples to dive and get it. The little 
fellows were hungry and took to the sport keenly; but 
one was timid, and only after the mother had twice dived 
and brought up a fish — which she showed to the timid 
one and then dropped back in a most tantalizing way 
— did he muster up resolution to take the plunge. 

A few mornings later, as I prowled along the shore, 
I came upon a little pool quite shut off from the main 



Kingfisher 's Kindergarten 113 

stream, in which a dozen or more frightened minnows 
were darting about, as if in strange quarters. As I 
stood watching them and wondering how they got 
over the dry bar that separated the pool from the river, 
a kingfisher came sweeping up-stream with a fish in 
his bill. Seeing me, he whirled silently and disap- 
peared round the point below. 

The thought of the curious little wild kindergarten 
occurred to me suddenly as I turned to the minnows 
again, and I waded across the river and hid in the 
bushes. After an hour's wait Koskomenos came 
stealing back, looked carefully over the pool and the 
river, and swept down-stream with a rattling call. 
Presently he came back again with his mate and the 
whole family; and the little ones, after seeing their 
parents swoop, and tasting the fish they caught, 
began to swoop for themselves. 

The first plunges were usually in vain, and when a 
minnow was caught it was undoubtedly one of the 
wounded fish that Koskomenos had placed there in 
the lively swarm to encourage his little ones. After a 
try or two, however, they seemed to get the knack of 
the thing and would drop like a plummet, bill first, or 
shoot down on a sharp incline and hit their fish 
squarely as it darted away into deeper water. The 
river was wild and difficult, suitable only for expert 



ii4 A Little Brother to the Bear 

fishermen. The quietest pools had no fish, and where 
minnows were found the water or the banks were 
against the little kingfishers, who had not yet learned 
to hover and take their fish from the wing. So Kos- 
komenos had found a suitable pool and stocked it him- 
self to make his task of teaching more easy for his 
mate and more profitable for his little ones. The 
most interesting point in his method was that, in this 
case, he had brought the minnows alive to his kinder- 
garten, instead of killing or wounding them, as in the 
first lesson. He knew that the fish could not get out 
of the pool, and that his little ones could take their 
own time in catching them. 

When I saw the family again, weeks afterwards, 
their lessons were well learned ; they needed no 
wounded or captive fish to satisfy their hunger. They 
were full of the joy of living, and showed me, one day, 
a curious game, — the only play that I have ever seen 
among the kingfishers. 

There were three of them, when I first found them, 
perched on projecting stubs over the dancing riffles, 
which swarmed with chub and " minnies " and samlets 
and lively young red-fins. Suddenly, as if at the com- 
mand go ! they all dropped, bill first, into the river. 
In a moment they were out again and rushed back 
to their respective stubs, where they threw their heads 



Kingfisher s Kindergarten 1 1 5 

back and wriggled their minnows down their throats 
with a haste to choke them all. That done, they 
began to dance about on their stubs, clattering and 
chuckling immoderately. 

It was all blind to me at first, till the game was 
repeated two or three times, always starting at the 
same instant with a plunge into the riffles and a rush 
• back to goal. Then their object was as clear as the 
stream below them. With plenty to eat and never a 
worry in the world, they were playing a game to see 
which could first get back to his perch and swallow 
his fish. Sometimes one or two of them failed to get 
a fish and glided back dejectedly ; sometimes all three 
were so close together that it took a deal of jab- 
ber to straighten the matter out; and they always 
ended in the same way, by beginning all over again. 

Koskomenos is a solitary fellow, with few pleasures, 
and fewer companions to share them with him. This 
is undoubtedly the result of his peculiar fishing regu- 
lations, which give to each kingfisher a certain piece 
of lake or stream for his own. Only the young of the 
same family go fishing together; and so I have no 
doubt that these were the same birds whose early 
training I had watched, and who were now enjoying 
themselves in their own way, as all the other Wood 
Folk do, in the fat, careless, happy autumn days. 




EKOMPF the wildcat is one of the savage 
beasts that have not yet vanished from the 
haunts of men. Sometimes, as you clamber up the 
wooded hillside above the farm, you will come sud- 
denly upon a fierce-looking, catlike creature stretched 
out on a rock sunning himself. At sight of you he 
leaps up with a snarl, and you have a swift instant in 
which to take his measure. He is twice as big as a 
house-cat, with round head and big expressionless 
eyes that glare straight into yours with a hard, green- 
ish glitter. His reddish-brown sides are spotted here 
and there, and the white fur of his belly is blotched 
with black — the better to hide himself amid the lights 
and shadows. A cat, sure enough, but unlike anything 
of the kind you have ever seen before. 



Pekompf s Cunning 1 1 7 

As you look and wonder, there is a faint sound that 
you will do well to heed. The muscles of his long 
thick legs are working nervously, and under the mo- 
tion is a warning purr, not the soft rumble in a 
contented tabby's throat, but the cut and rip of ugly 
big claws as they are unsheathed viciously upon the 
dry leaves. His stub tail is twitching — you had not 
noticed it before, but now it whips back and forth 
angrily, as if to call attention to the fact that Nature 
had not altogether forgotten that end of Pekompf. 
Whip, whip, it is a tail — k'yaaaah! And you jump 
as the fierce creature screeches in your face. 

If it is your first wildcat, you will hardly know what 
to do, — to stand perfectly quiet is always best, unless 
you have a stick or gun in your hand, — and if you 
have met Pekompf many times before, you are quite 
as uncertain what he will do this time. Most wild 
creatures, however fierce, prefer to mind their own 
business and will respect the same sentiment in you. 
But when you stumble upon a wildcat you are never 
sure of his next move. That is because he is a slink- 
ing, treacherous creature, and never quite knows how 
best to meet you. He suspects you unreasonably, 
because he knows you suspect him with reason. 
Generally he slinks away, or leaps suddenly for cover, 
according to the method of your approach. But, 



1 1 8 A Little Brother to the Bear 

though smaller, he is naturally more savage than either 
the Canada lynx or the panther, and sometimes he 
crouches and snarls in your face, or even jumps for 
your chest at the first movement. 

Once, to my knowledge, he fell like a fury upon 
the shoulders of a man who was hurrying homeward 
through the twilight, and who happened to stop una- 
wares under the tree where Pekompf was watch- 
ing the runways. The man had no idea that a wildcat 
was near, and he probably never would have known 
had he gone steadily on his way. As he told me 
afterwards, he felt a sudden alarm and stopped to 
listen. The moment he did so the savage creature 
above him thought himself discovered, and leaped to 
carry the war into Africa. There was a pounce, a 
screech, a ripping of cloth, a wild yell for help ; then 
the answering shout and rush of two woodsmen with 
their axes. And that night Pekompf's skin was 
nailed to the barn-door to dry in the sun before being 
tanned and made up into a muff for the woodsman's 
little, girl to warm her fingers withal in the bitter 
winter weather. 

Where civilization has driven most of his fellows 
away, Pekompf is a shy, silent creature; but where 
the farms are scattered and the hillsides wild and 
wooded, he is bolder and more noisy than in the 



Pekompfs Cunning 119 

unpeopled wilderness. From the door of the charcoal- 
burner's hut, in the Connecticut hills, you may still 
hear him screeching and fighting with his fellows 
as the twilight falls, and the yowling uproar causes a 
colder chill in your back than anything you will ever 
hear in the wilderness. As you follow the trout 
stream, from which the charcoal man daily fills his 
kettle, you may find Pekompf stretched on a fallen 
log under the alders, glaring intently into the trout 
pool, waiting, waiting — for what ? 

It will take many seasons of watching to answer this 
natural question, which every one who is a follower 
of the wild things has asked himself a score of times. 
All the cats have but one form of patience, the patience 
of quiet waiting. Except when hunger-driven, their 
way of hunting is to watch beside the game paths or 
crouch upon a big limb above the place where their 
game comes down to drink. Sometimes they vary 
their programme by prowling blindly through the 
woods, singly or in pairs, trusting to luck to blunder 
upon their game ; for they are wretched hunters. 
They rarely follow a trail, not simply because their 
noses are not keen — for in the snow, with a trail as 
plain as a deer path, they break away from it with 
reckless impatience, only to scare the game into a 
headlong dash for safety. Then they will crouch 



120 A Little Brother to the Bear 

under a dwarf spruce and stare at the trail with round 
unblinking eyes, waiting for the frightened creatures 
to come back, or for other creatures to come by in 
the same footprints. Even in teaching her young a 
mother wildcat is full of snarling whims and tempers ; 
but now let a turkey gobble far away in the woods, let 
Musquash dive into his den where she can see it, let 
but a woodmouse whisk out of sight into his hidden 
doorway, — and instantly patience returns to Pekompf. 
All the snarling ill-temper vanishes. She crouches and 
waits, and forgets all else. She may have just fed full 
on what she likes best, and so have no desire for food 
and no expectation of catching more; but she must 
still watch, as if to reassure herself that her eyes are 
not deceived, and that Tookhees is really there, under 
the mossy stone, where she saw the scurry of his little 
legs and heard his frightened squeak as he disappeared. 
But why should a cat watch at a trout pool, out of 
which nothing ever comes to reward his patience? 
That was a puzzling question for many years. I had 
seen Pekompf many times stretched on a log, or lying 
close to a great rock, over the water, so intent on his 
watching that he heard not my cautious approach. 
Twice from* my canoe I had seen Upweekis the lynx 
on the shore of a wilderness lake, crouched among the 
weather-worn roots of a stranded pine, his great paws 



Pekompf's Cunning 121 

almost touching the water, his eyes fixed with unblink- 
ing stare on the deep pool below. And once, when 
trout fishing on a wild river just opposite a great jam 
of logs and driftwood, I had stopped casting suddenly 
with an uncanny feeling of being watched by unseen 
eyes at my solitary sport. 

It is always well to heed such a warning in the 
woods. I looked up and down quickly ; but the river 
held no life above its hurrying flood. I searched the 
banks carefully and peered suspiciously into the woods 
behind me ; but save for the dodging of a winter wren, 
who seems always to be looking for something that he 
has lost and that he does not want you to know about, 
the shores were wild and still as if just created. I 
whipped out my flies again. What was that, just 
beyond the little wavelet where my Silver Doctor had 
fallen ? Something moved, curled, flipped and twisted 
nervously. It was a tail, the tip end that cannot be 
quiet. And there — an irrepressible chill trickled over 
me as I made out the outlines of a great gray beast 
stretched on a fallen log, and caught the gleam of his 
wild eyes fixed steadily upon me. Even as I saw the 
thing it vanished like a shadow of the woods. But what 
was the panther watching there before he watched me ? 

The answer came unexpectedly. It was in the 
Pemigewasset valley, in midsummer. At daybreak 



122 A Little Brother to the Bear 

I had come softly down the wood road to the trout 
pool and stopped to watch a mink dodging in and 
out along the shore. When- he passed out of sight 
under some logs I waited quietly for other Wood Folk 
to show themselves. A slight movement on the end 
of a log — and there was Pekompf, so still that the 
eye could hardly find him, stretching a paw down 
cautiously and flipping it back with a peculiar inward 
sweep. Again he did it, and I saw the long curved 
claws, keen as fish-hooks, stretched wide out of their 
sheaths. He was fishing, spearing his prey with the 
patience of an Indian ; and even as I made the dis- 
covery there was a flash of silver following the quick 
jerk of his paw, and Pekompf leaped to the shore and 
crouched over the fish that he had thrown out of the 
water. 

So Pekompf watches the pools as he watches a 
squirrel's hole, because he has seen game there, and 
because he likes fish above everything else that the 
woods can furnish. But how often must he watch 
the big trout before he catches one ? Sometimes, in 
the twilight, the largest fish will move out of the 
pools and nose along the shore for food, their back 
fins showing out of the shallow water as they glide 
along. It may be that Pekompf sometimes catches 
them at this time, and so when he sees the gleam of a 



' A flash of silver following the quick 
jerk of his paw " 



Pekompf's Cunning 123 

fish in the depths he crouches where he is for a while, 
following the irresistible impulse of all cats at the 
sight of game. Herein they differ from all other sav- 
age beasts, which, when not hungry, pay no attention 
whatever to smaller animals. 

It may be, also,, that Pekompf's cunning is deeper 
than this.' Old Noel, a Micmac hunter, tells me that 
both wildcat and lynx, whose cunning is generally the 
cunning of stupidity, have discovered a remarkable 
way of catching fish. They will lie with their heads 
close to the water, their paws curved for a quick 
grab, their eyes half shut to deceive the fish, and 
their whiskers just touching and playing with the sur- 
face. Their general color blends with that of their 
surroundings and hides them perfectly. The trout, 
noticing the slight crinkling of the water where the 
long whiskers touch it, but not separating the crouch- 
ing animal from the log or rock on which he rests, rise 
to the surface, as is their wont when feeding, and are 
snapped out by a lightning sweep of the paws. 

Whether this be so or not, I am not sure. The 
raccoon undoubtedly catches crabs and little fish in 
this way ; and I have sometimes surprised cats — both 
wildcats and Canada lynxes, as well as domestic tab- 
bies — with their heads down close to the water, so 
still that they seemed part of the log or rock on which 



124 A Little Brother to the Bear 

they crouched. Once I tried for five minutes to make 
a guide see a big lynx that was lying on a root in 
plain sight within thirty yards of our canoe, while the 
guide assured me in a whisper that he could see per- 
fectly and that it was only a stump. Then, hearing 
us, the lynx rose, stared, and leaped for the brush. 

Such hiding would easily deceive even a trout, for 
I have often taken my position at the edge of a jam 
and, after lying perfectly still for ten minutes, have 
seen the wary fish rise from under the logs to investi- 
gate a straw or twig that I held in my fingers, and 
with which I touched the water here and there, like 
an insect at play. 

So Old Noel is probably right when he says that 
Pekompf fishes with his whiskers, for the habits of 
both fish and cats seem to carry out his observations. 

But deeper than his cunning is Pekompf's inborn 
suspicion and his insane fury at being opposed or cor- 
nered. The trappers catch him, as they catch his big 
cousin the lucivee, by setting a snare in the rabbit 
paths that he nightly follows. Opposite the noose 
and attached to the other end of the cord is a pole, 
which jumps after the cat as he starts forward with 
the loop about his neck. Were it a fox, now, he 
would back out of the snare, or lie still and cut the 
cord with his teeth and so escape. But, like all cats 



Pekompf s Cunning 125 

when trapped, Pekompf flies into a blind fury. He 
screeches at the unoffending stick, claws it, battles 
with it, and literally chokes himself in his rage. Or, 
if he be an old cat and his cunning a bit deeper, he 
will go off cautiously and climb the biggest tree he 
can find, with the uncomfortable thing that he is tied 
to dangling and clattering behind him. When near 
the top he will leave the stick hanging on one side 
of a limb while he cunningly climbs down the other, 
thinking thus to fool his dumb enemy and leave him 
behind. One of two things always happens. Either 
the stick catches in the crotch and Pekompf hangs 
himself on his own gibbet, or else it comes over with 
a sudden jerk and falls to the ground, pulling Pekompf 
with it and generally killing him in the fall. 

It is a cruel, brutal kind of device at best, and fortu- 
nately for the cat tribe it has almost vanished from the 
northern woods, except in the far Northwest, where 
the half-breeds still use it for lynx successfully. But as 
a study of the way in which trappers seize upon some 
peculiarity of an animal and use it for his destruction, 
it has no equal. 

That Pekompf's cunning is of the cat kind, suspi- 
cious without being crafty or intelligent, like that of 
the fox or wolf, is curiously shown by a habit which 
both lynx and wildcat have in common, namely, that 



126 A Little Brother to the Bear 

of carrying anything they steal to the top of some lofty 
evergreen to devour it. When they catch a rabbit or 
fish fairly themselves, they generally eat it on the spot ; 
but when they steal the same animal from snare or 
cache, or from some smaller hunter, the cat suspicion 
returns — together with some dim sense of wrong- 
doing, which all animals feel more or less — and they 
make off with the booty and eat it greedily where they 
think no one will ever find them. 

Once, when watching for days under a fish-hawk's 
nest to see the animals that came in shyly to eat the 
scraps that the little fish-hawks cast out when their 
hunger was satisfied, this cat habit was strikingly 
manifest. Other animals would come in and quietly 
eat what they found and slip away again ; but the cats 
would seize on a morsel with flashing eyes, as if defying 
all law and order, and would either growl horribly as 
they ate or else would slink away guiltily and, as I 
found out by following, would climb the biggest tree 
at hand and eat the morsel in the highest crotch that 
gave a foothold. And once, on the Maine coast in 
November, I saw a fierce battle in the tree-tops, 
where a wildcat crouched, snarling like twenty fiends, 
while a big eagle whirled and swooped over him, 
trying to take away the game that Pekompf had 
stolen. 



Pekompf's Cunning 127 

By far the most curious bit of Pekompf's cunning 
came under my eyes, one summer, a few years ago. 
Until recently I had supposed it to be a unique dis- 
covery; but last summer a friend, who goes to New- 
foundland every year for the salmon fishing, had a 
similar experience with a Canada lynx, which empha- 
sizes the tendency of all cats to seek the tree-tops 
with anything that they have stolen ; though curiously 
enough I have never found any trace of it with game 
that they had caught honestly themselves. It was in 
Nova Scotia, where I was trout fishing for a little sea- 
son, and where I had no idea of meeting Pekompf, for 
the winters are severe there and the wildcat is supposed 
to leave such places to his more powerful and longer- 
legged cousin, the lynx, whose feet are bigger than his 
and better padded for walking on the snow. Even in 
the southern Berkshires you may follow Pekompf's 
trail and see where he makes heavy weather of it, floun- 
dering belly-deep, like a domestic tabby, through the 
soft drifts in his hungry search for grouse and rabbits, 
and lying down in despair at last to wait till the snow 
settles. But to my surprise Pekompf was there, bigger, 
fiercer, and more cunning than I had ever seen him ; 
though I did not discover this till after a long search. 

I had fished from dawn till almost six o'clock 
one morning, and had taken two good trout, which 



128 A Little Brother to the Bear 

were all that the stream promised to yield for the day. 
Then I thought of a little pond in the woods over the 
mountain, which looked trouty when I had discovered 
it, and which, so far as I knew, had never been fished 
with a fly. Led more by the fun of exploring than by 
the expectation of fish, I started to try the new waters. 

The climb through the woods promised to be a hard 
one, so I left everything behind except rod, reel, and 
fly-book. My coat was hung on the nearest bush ; 
the landing-net lay in the shade across a rock, the end 
of the handle wedged under a root, and I dropped my 
two trout into that and covered them from the sun 
with ferns and moss. Then I started off through the 
woods for the little pond. 

When I came back empty-handed, a few hours later, 
trout and landing-net were gone. The first thought 
naturally was that some one had stolen them, and I 
looked for the thief's tracks; but, save my own, there 
was not a footprint anywhere beside the stream up or 
down. Then I looked beside the rock more carefully 
and found bits of moss and fish-scales, and the pugs of 
some animal, too faint in the gravel to make out what 
the beast was that made them. I followed the faint 
traces for a hundred yards or more into the woods till 
they led me to a great spruce tree, under which every 
sign disappeared utterly, as if the creature had suddenly 



Pekompf's Cunning 129 

flown away net and all, and I gave up the trail with- 
out any idea of what had made it. 

For two weeks that theft bothered me. It was not 
so much the loss of my two trout and net, but rather 
the loss of my woodcraft on the trail that had no end, 
which kept me restless. The net was a large one, 
altogether too large and heavy for trout fishing. At 
the last moment before starting on my trip I found 
that my trout net was rotten and useless, and so had 
taken the only thing at hand, a specially made forty- 
inch net which I had last used on a scientific expedition 
for collecting specimens from the lakes of northern 
New Brunswick. The handle was long, and the bow, 
as I had more than once tested, was powerful enough 
to use instead of a gaff for taking a twenty-five pound 
salmon out of his pool after he had been played to a 
standstill ; and how any creature could drag it off 
through the woods without leaving a plain trail for my 
eyes to follow puzzled me, and excited a most lively 
curiosity to know who he was and why he had not 
eaten the fish where he found them. Was it lynx or 
stray wolf, or had the terrible Injun Devil that is still 
spoken of with awe at the winter firesides returned to 
his native woods ? For a week I puzzled over the 
question; then I went back to the spot and tried in 
vain to follow the faint marks in the moss. After 



130 A Little Brother to the Bear 

that whenever I wandered near the spot I tried the 
trail again, or circled wider and wider through the 
woods, hoping to find the net or some positive sign of 
the beast that had stolen it. 

One day in the woods it occurred to me suddenly 
that, while I had followed the trail three or four times, 
I had never thought to examine the tree beneath 
which it ended. At the thought I went to the big 
spruce and there, sure enough, were flecks of bright 
brown here and there where the rough outer shell had 
been chipped off. And there also, glimmering white, 
was a bit of dried slime where a fish had rested for an 
instant against the bark. The beast, whatever he was, 
had climbed the tree with his booty ; and the discovery 
was no sooner made than I was shinning up eagerly 
after him. 

Near the scraggy top I found my net, its long 
handle wedged firmly in between two branches, its bow- 
caught on a projecting stub, its bag hanging down 
over empty space. In the net was a big wildcat, his 
round head driven through a hole which he had bitten 
in the bottom, the tough meshes drawn taut as fiddle- 
strings about his throat. All four legs had clawed or 
pushed their way through the mesh, till every kick and 
struggle served only to bind and choke him more 
effectually. 



Pekompf's Cunning 131 

From little marks and almost imperceptible signs I 
made out at last the outline of the story. Pekompf 
had found the fish and tried to steal them ; but his 
suspicions were roused by the queer net and the clat- 
tering handle. With true lynx cunning, which is 
always more than half stupidity, he had carried it off 
and started to climb the biggest tree he could find. 
Near the top the handle had wedged among the 
branches, and while he tried to dislodge it net and fish 
had swung clear of the trunk. In the bark below the 
handle I found where he had clung to the tree boll 
and tried to reach the swinging trout with his paw; 
and on a branch above the bow were marks which 
showed where he had looked down longingly at the 
fish at the bottom of the net, just below his hungry 
nose. From this branch he had either fallen or, more 
likely, in a fit of blind rage had leaped into the net, 
which closed around him and held him more effectu- 
ally than bars of iron. When I came under the tree 
for the first time, following his trail, he was probably 
crouched on a limb over my head watching me steadily ; 
and when I came back the second time he was dead. 

That was all that one could be sure about. But here 
and there, in a torn mesh, or a tuft of fur, or the rip of 
a claw against a swaying twig, were the marks of a strug- 
gle whose savage intensity one could only imagine. 




OST people have 
seen a sick cat eat grass, 
or an uneasy dog seek out 
some weed and devour it greedily to make his com- 
plaining stomach feel better. Some few may have 
read John Wesley's directions on the art of keeping 
well — which have not, however, found their way into 
his book of discipline for the soul — and have noted 
with surprised interest his claim that many medicines 
in use among the common people and the physicians 
of his time were discovered by watching the animals 
that sought out these things to heal their diseases. 
" If they heal animals they will also heal men " is 
his invincible argument. Others may have dipped 
deep into Indian history and folk-lore, and learned 

that many of the herbs used by the American tribes, 

132 



Animal Surgery 133 

and especially the cures for rheumatism, dysentery, 
fever, and snake bites, were learned direct from the 
animals, by noting the rheumatic old bear grub for 
fern roots or bathe in the hot mud of a sulphur 
spring, and by watching with eager eyes what plants 
the wild creatures ate when bitten by rattlers or 
wasted by the fever. Still others have been fascinated 
with the first crude medical knowledge of the Greeks, 
which came to them from the East undoubtedly, and 
have read that the guarded mysteries of the Asclepi- 
ades, the healing cult that followed ^Esculapius, had 
among them many simple remedies that had first 
proved their efficacy among animals in a natural 
state ; and that Hippocrates, the greatest physician of 
antiquity, whose fame under the name of Bokrat the 
Wise went down through Arabia and into the farthest 
deserts, owes many of his medical aphorisms to what 
he himself, or his forbears, must have seen out of doors 
among the wild creatures. And all these seers and 
readers have perhaps wondered how much the animals 
knew, and especially how they came to know it. 

To illustrate the matter simply and in our own day 
and generation: A deer that has been chased all day 
long by dogs, and that has escaped at last by swim- 
ming an icy river and fallen exhausted on the farther 
shore, will lie down to sleep in the snow. That would 



134 ^ Little Brother to the Bear 

inean swift death for any human being. Half the 
night the deer will move about at short intervals, in- 
stead of sleeping heavily, and in the morning he is as 
good as ever and ready for another run. The same 
deer shut up in a warm barn to sleep overnight, as has 
been more than once tested with park animals, will be 
found dead in the morning. 

Here is a natural law of healing suggested, which, if 
noted among the Greeks and Indians, would have been 
adopted instantly as a method of dealing with extreme 
cold and exhaustion, or with poisoning resulting in 
paralysis of the muscles. Certainly the method, if 
somewhat crude, might still have wrought enough 
cures to be looked upon with veneration by a people 
who unfortunately had no knowledge of chemical 
drugs, or Scotch whisky, or sugar pellets with an 
ethereal suggestion of intangible triturations some- 
where in the midst of them. 

That the animals do practice at times a rude kind 
of medicine and surgery upon themselves is undeni- 
able. The only question about it is, How do they 
know? To say it is a matter of instinct is but beg- 
ging the question. It is also three-fourths foolishness, 
for many of the things that animals do are beyond the 
farthest scope of instinct. The case of the deer that 
moved about and so saved his life, instead of sleeping 




' Escaped at last by swimming 
an icy river ' ' 



Animal Surgery 135 

on heavily to his death, may be partly a case of in- 
stinct. Personally it seems to me more a matter of 
experience ; for a fawn under the same circumstances, 
unless his mother were near to lick him with her 
tongue and keep him moving, would undoubtedly lie 
down and die. More than that, it seems to be largely 
a matter of obedience to the strongest impulse of the 
moment, to which all animals are accustomed or 
trained from their birthday. And that is not quite the 
same thing as instinct, unless one is disposed to go 
to the extreme of Berkeley's philosophy and make 
instinct a kind of spirit-personality that watches over 
animals all the time. Often the knowledge of healing, 
or of primitive surgery, seems to be the discovery or 
possession of a few rare individual animals, instead of 
being spread widecast among the species, as instincts 
are. This knowledge, or what-you-may-call-it, is some- 
times shared, and so hints at a kind of communication 
among animals, of whose method we catch only fleet- 
ing glimpses and suggestions — but that will be the 
subject of another article. The object of this is, not to 
answer the questions of how or whence, but simply to 
suggest one or two things I have seen in the woods as 
the basis for further and more detailed observations. 

The most elemental kind of surgery is that which 
amputates a leg when it is broken, not always or often, 



136 A Little Brother to the Bear 

but only when the wound festers from decay or fly-bite 
and so endangers the whole body. Probably the best 
illustration of this is found in the coon, who has a 
score of traits that place him very high among intelli- 
gent animals. When a coon's foot is shattered by a 
bullet he will cut it off promptly and wash the stump 
in running water, partly to reduce the inflammation 
and partly, no doubt, to make it perfectly clean. As 
it heals he uses his tongue on the wound freely, as a 
dog does, to cleanse it perhaps, and by the soft mas- 
sage of his tongue to reduce the swelling and allay the 
pain. 

So far this may or may not be pure instinct. For I 
do not know, and who will tell me, whether a child 
puts his wounded hand to his mouth and sucks and 
cleanses the hurt by pure instinct, or because he has 
seen others do it, or because he has had his hurts kissed 
away in childhood, and so imitates the action uncon- 
sciously when his mother is not near. 

Most mother animals tongue their little ones freely. 
Now is that a caress, or is it some hygienic measure 
begun at birth, when she devours all traces of the 
birth-envelopes and licks the little ones clean lest the 
nose of some hungry prowler bring him near to de- 
stroy the family ? Certainly the young are conscious 
of the soft tongue that rubs them fondly, and so when 



Animal Surgery 137 

they lick their own wounds it may be only a memory 
and an imitation, — two factors, by the way, which lie 
at the bottom of all elemental education. That expla- 
nation, of course, leaves the amputated leg out of the 
question ; and the surgery does not stop here. 

When a boy, and still barbarian enough to delight 
in trapping, partly from a love of the chase that was 
born in me, and partly to put money into a boy's 
empty pocket, I once caught a muskrat in a steel trap 
that slid off into deep water at the first pull and so 
drowned the creature mercifully. This was due to the 
careful instructions of Natty Dingle, at whose feet I 
sat to learn woodcraft, and who used the method to 
save all his pelts ; for often an animal, when caught in 
a trap, will snap the bone by a twist of his body and 
then cut the leg off with his teeth, and so escape, 
leaving his foot in the trap's jaws. This is common 
enough among fur-bearing animals to excite no com- 
ment ; and it is sad now to remember that sometimes 
I would find animals drowned in my traps, that had 
previously suffered at the hands of other trappers. 

I remember especially one big musquash that I was 
going to shoot near one of my traps, when I stopped 
short at noticing some queer thing about him. The 
trap was set in shallow water where a path made by 
muskrats came up out of the river into the grass. 



138 A Little Brother to the Bear 

Just over the trap was a turnip on a pointed stick to 
draw the creature's attention and give him something 
to anticipate until he should put his foot on the 
deadly pan beneath. But the old musquash avoided 
the path, as if he had suffered in such places before. 
Instead of following the ways of his ancestors he came 
out at another spot, behind the trap, and I saw with 
horrible regret that he had cut off both his fore legs, 
probably at different times, when he had been twice 
caught in man's abominable inventions. When he 
came up out of the stream he rose on his hind legs 
and waddled through the grass like a bear or a 
monkey, for he had no fore feet to rest upon. He 
climbed a tussock beside the bait with immense 
caution, pulled in the turnip with his two poor stumps 
of forearms, ate it where he was, and slipped back into 
the stream again ; while the boy watched with a new 
wonder in the twilight, and forgot all about the gun 
as he tended his traps. 

It does not belong with my story, but that night the 
traps came in, and never went out again ; and I can 
never pass a trap now anywhere without poking a stick 
into it to save some poor innocent leg. 

All this is digression ; and I have almost forgotten 
my surgery and the particular muskrat I was talking 
about. He, too, had been caught in some other 



Animal Surgery 139 

fellow's trap and had bitten his leg off only a few- 
days before. The wound was not yet healed, and the 
amazing thing about it was that he had covered it 
with some kind of sticky vegetable gum, probably 
from some pine-tree that had been split or barked 
close to the ground where Musquash could reach it 
easily. He had smeared it thickly all over the wound 
and well up the leg above it, so that all dirt and even 
all air and water were excluded perfectly. 

An old Indian, who lives and hunts on Vancouver 
Island, told me recently that he has several times 
caught beaver that had previously cut their legs off to 
escape from traps, and that two of them had covered 
the wounds thickly with gum, as the muskrat had 
done. Last spring the same Indian caught a bear in 
a deadfall. On the animal's side was a long rip from 
some other bear's claw, and the wound had been 
smeared thickly with soft spruce resin. This last 
experience corresponds closely with one of my own. 
I shot a big bear, years ago, in northern New Bruns- 
wick, that had received a gunshot wound, which had 
raked him badly and then penetrated the leg. He 
had plugged the wound carefully with clay, evidently 
to stop the bleeding, and then had covered the broken 
skin with sticky mud from the river's brink, to keep 
the flies away from the wound and give it a chance to 



140 A Little Brother to the Bear 

heal undisturbed. It is noteworthy here that the bear 
uses either gum or clay indifferently, while the beaver 
and muskrat seem to know enough to avoid the clay, 
which would be quickly washed off in the water. 

Here are a few incidents, out of a score or more 
that I have seen, or heard from reliable hunters, that 
indicate something more than native instinct among 
animals. When I turn to the birds the incidents are 
fewer but more remarkable ; for the birds, being lower 
in the scale of life, are more subject to instinct than 
are the animals, and so are less easily taught by their 
mothers, and are slower to change their natural habits 
to meet changing conditions. 

This is, of course, a very general statement and is 
subject to endless exceptions. The finches that, when 
transported to Australia from England, changed the 
style of their nests radically and now build in a fash- 
ion entirely different from that of their parents ; the 
little goldfinch of New England that will build a false 
bottom to her nest to cover up the tgg of a cow-bird 
that has been left to hatch among her own ; the 
grouse that, near the dwellings of men, are so much 
wilder and keener than their brethren of the wilder- 
ness; the swallows that adopt the chimneys and 
barns of civilization instead of the hollow trees and 
clay banks of their native woods, — all these and a 



Animal Surgery 141 

score of others show how readily instinct is modified 
among the birds, and how the young are taught a 
wisdom that their forefathers never knew. Neverthe- 
less it is true, I think, that instincts are generally 
sharper with them than with animals, and the following 
cases suggest all the more strongly that we must look 
beyond instinct to training and individual discovery 
to account for many things among the feathered folk. 
The most wonderful bit of bird surgery that has ever 
come to my attention is that of the woodcock that 
set his broken leg in a clay cast, as related in a pre- 
vious chapter ; but there is one other almost as re- 
markable that opens up a question that is even harder 
to answer. One day, in the early spring, I saw two 
eider-ducks swimming about the Hummock Pond on 
the island of Nantucket. The keen-eyed critic will 
interfere here and say I was mistaken ; for eiders are 
salt-water ducks that haunt only the open sea, and are 
supposed never to enter fresh water, not even to breed. 
That is what I also supposed until I saw these two ; 
so I sat down to watch awhile and find out, if possible, 
what had caused them to change their habits. At 
this time of year the birds are almost invariably found 
in pairs, and sometimes a flock a hundred yards long 
will pass you, flying close to the water and sweeping 
around the point where you are watching, first a 



142 A Little Brother to the Bear 

pretty brown female and then a gorgeous black-and- 
white drake just behind her, alternating with perfect 
regularity, female and male, throughout the whole 
length of the long line. The two birds before me, 
however, were both females ; and that was another 
reason for watching them instead of the hundreds of 
other ducks, coots and sheldrakes and broadbills that 
were scattered all over the big pond. 

The first thing noticed was that the birds were act- 
ing queerly, dipping their heads under water and 
keeping them there for a full minute or more at a 
time. That was also curious, for the water under 
them was too deep for feeding, and the eiders prefer to 
wait till the tide falls and then .gather the exposed 
shellfish from the rocks, rather than to dive after them, 
like a coot. Darkness came on speedily to hide the 
birds, which were still dipping their heads as if be- 
witched, and I went away no wiser for my watching. 

A few weeks later there was another eider, a big 
drake, in the same pond, behaving in the same queer 
way. Thinking perhaps that this was a wounded bird 
that had gone crazy from a shot in the head, as ducks 
often do, I pushed out after him in an old tub of a 
boat; but he took wing at my approach, like any 
other duck, and after a vigorous flight lit farther down 
the pond and plunged his head under water again. 



Animal Surgery 143 

Thoroughly curious now, I went on a still hunt after 
the stranger, and after much difficulty succeeded in 
shooting him from the end of a bushy point. The 
only unusual thing about him was that a large mussel, 
such as grow on the rocks in salt water, had closed 
his shells firmly on the bird's tongue in such a way 
that he could neither be crushed by the bird's bill nor 
scratched off by the bird's foot. I pulled the mussel 
off, put it in my pocket, and went home more mysti- 
fied than before. 

That night I hunted up an old fisherman, who had 
a big store of information in his head about all kinds 
of wild things, and asked him if he had ever seen a 
shoal-duck in fresh water. " Once or twice," he said ; 
"they kept dipping their heads under water, kinder 
crazy like." But he had no explanation to offer until I 
showed him the mussel that I had found on the duck's 
tongue. Then his face lightened. " Mussels of that 
kind won't live in fresh water," he declared at a glance ; 
and then the explanation of the birds' queer actions 
flashed into both our heads at once : the eiders were 
simply drowning the mussels in order to make them 
loosen their grip and release the captive tongues. For 
the moment a sea mollusc is put in fresh water the 
salts in his body are dissolved, the osmotic balance is 
disturbed, and he speedily swells up and becomes sick. 



144 A Little Brother to the Bear 

This is undoubtedly the true explanation, as I made 
sure by testing the mussels repeatedly in fresh water, 
and by watching the birds more closely at their feed- 
ing. All winter they may be found along our coasts, 
where they feed on the small shellfish that cover the 
ledges. As the tide goes down they swim in from the 
shoals, where they rest in scattered flocks, and chip 
the mussels from the ledges, swallowing them shells 
and all. A score of times I have hidden among the 
rocks of the jetty, with a few wooden decoys in front 
of me, and watched the eiders come in to feed. They 
would approach the decoys rapidly, lifting their wings 
repeatedly as a kind of salutation; then, angered ap- 
parently that they were not welcomed by the same 
signal of uplifted wings, they would swim up to the 
wooden frauds and peck them savagely here and there, 
and then leave them in disgust and scatter among the 
rocks at my feet, paying little attention to me as long 
as I kept perfectly still. For they are much tamer 
than other wild clucks, and are, unfortunately, slow to 
believe that man is their enemy. 

I noticed another curious thing while watching 
them and hoping that by some chance I might see one 
caught by a mussel. When a flock was passing high 
overhead, any sudden noise — a shout, or the near 
report of a gun — would make the whole flock swoop 



Animal Surgery 145 

down like a flash close to the water. Plover have the 
same habit when they first arrive from Labrador, but I 
have hunted in vain for any satisfactory explanation 
of the thing. 

As the birds feed, a mussel will sometimes close his 
shells hard on some careless duck's tongue or bill, in 
such a way that he cannot be crushed or swallowed or 
broken against the rocks. In that case the bird, if he 
knows the secret, will fly to fresh water and drown his 
tormentor. Whether all the ducks have this wisdom, 
or whether it is confined to a few rare birds, there is no 
present means of knowing. I have seen three different 
eiders practice this bit of surgery myself, and have 
heard of at least a dozen more, all of the same species, 
that were seen in fresh ponds or rivers, dipping their 
heads under water repeatedly. In either case two 
interesting questions suggest themselves: first, How 
did a bird, whose whole life from birth to death is 
spent on the sea, first learn that certain mussels will 
drown in fresh water ? and, second, How do the other 
birds know it now, when the need arises unexpectedly ? 




E man who hunts with gun or 
camera has his reward. He has also his labors, 
vexations, and failures ; and these are the price he 
pays for his success. The man who hunts without 
either gun or camera has, it seems to me, a much 
greater reward, and has it without price. Of him 
more than of any other Nimrod may be said what a 
returned missionary from Africa said of his first con- 
gregation, "They are a contented folk, clothed with 
the sunlight and fed by gravitation." Hunting with- 
out a gun is, therefore, the sport of a peaceful man, 
a man who goes to the woods for rest and for letting 
his soul grow, and who, after a year of worry and work, 
is glad to get along without either for a little season. 

As he glides over the waterways in his canoe, or loafs 

i 4 6 



Hunting without a Gun 147 

leisurely along the trail, he carries no weight of gun or 
tripod or extra plates. Glad to be alive himself, he 
has no pleasure in the death of the wild things. Con- 
tent just to see and hear and understand, he has no 
fret or sweat to get the sun just right and calculate his 
exact thirty-foot distance and then to fume and swear, 
as I have heard good men do, because the game fidgets, 
or the clouds obscure the sun, or the plates are not 
quick enough, or — beginning of sorrows ! — because 
he finds after the game has fled that the film he has 
just used on a bull moose had all its good qualities 
already preempted by a landscape and a passing canoe. 
I have no desire to decry any kind of legitimate 
hunting, for I have tried them all and the rewards are 
good. I simply like hunting without a gun or camera 
better than all other forms of hunting for three good 
reasons : first, because it is lazy and satisfying, perfect 
for summer weather ; second, because it has no troubles, 
no vexations, no disappointments, and so is good for a 
man who has wrestled long enough with these things ; 
and third, because it lets you into the life and individu- 
ality of the wild animals as no other hunting can possi- 
bly do, since you approach them with a mind at ease 
and, having no excitement about you, they dare to 
show themselves natural and unconcerned, or even a 
bit curious about you to know who you are and what 



148 A Little Brother to the Bear 

you are doing. It has its thrills and excitements too, 
as much or as little as you like. To creep up through 
the brulee to where the bear and her cubs are gather- 
ing blueberries in their greedy, funny way ; to paddle 
silently upon a big moose while his head is under 
water and only his broad antlers show ; to lie at ease 
beside the trail, flecked with sunlight and shadow, and 
have the squirrels scamper across your legs, or the 
wild bird perch inquisitively upon your toe, or — rarest 
sight in the woods in the early morning — to have a 
fisher twist by you in intense, weasel-like excitement, 
puzzling out the trail of the hare or grouse that passed 
you an hour ago ; to steal along the waterways alone, 
on a still, dark night, and open your jack silently upon 
ducks or moose or mother deer and her fawns, — there 
is joy and tingle enough in all these things to satisfy 
any lover of the woods. There is also wisdom to be 
found, especially when you remember that these are 
individual animals that no human eyes have ever before 
looked upon, that they are different every one, and that 
at any moment they may reveal some queer trick or 
trait of animal life that no naturalist has ever before 
seen. 

Last summer, just below my camp on Matagammon, 
was a little beach between two points surrounded 
by dense woods that the deer seemed to love better 



Hunting without a Gun 149 

than any other spot on the whole lake. When we 
first arrived the deer were close about our camp. 
From the door we could sometimes see them on the 
lake shore, and every evening at twilight they would 
steal up shyly to eat the potato and apple parings. 
Gradually the noises of camp drove them far back on 
the ridges, though on stormy nights they would come 
back when the camp was still and all lights out. 
From my tent I would hear cautious rustlings, or the 
crack of a twig, above the drip and pour of raindrops 
on my tent-fly, and stealing out in the darkness 
would find two or three deer, generally a doe and her 
fawns, standing under the split roof of our woodshed 
to escape the pelting rain. 

The little beach was farther away, across an arm of 
the lake and out of sight and sound of our camp, so 
the deer never deserted it, though we watched them 
there every day. Just why they liked it I could never 
discover. A score of beaches on the lake were larger 
and smoother, and a dozen at least offered better feed- 
ing; but the deer came here in greater numbers than 
anywhere else. Near by was a great wild meadow, 
with dense hiding-places on the slopes beyond, where 
deer were numerous. Before the evening feeding 
began in the wild meadow they would come out to 
this little beach and play for an hour or so; and I 



1 50 A Little Brother to the Bear 

have no doubt the place was a regular playground, 
such as rabbits and foxes and crows, and indeed most 
wild animals, choose for their hours of fun. 

Once, at early twilight, I lay in hiding among some 
old roots at the end of this little beach, watching a 
curious game. Eight or ten deer, does and fawns and 
young spike bucks, had come out into the open and 
were now running rapidly in three circles arranged in 
a line, so, oO°- I n the middle was a big circle some 
fifteen feet in diameter, and at opposite sides were two 
smaller circles less than half the diameter of the first, 
as I found afterwards by measuring from the tracks. 
Around one of these small circles the deer ran from 
right to left invariably; around the other they ran 
from left to right ; and around the big middle circle 
they ran either way, though when two or three were 
running this circle together, while the others bounded 
about the ends, they all ran the same way. As they 
played, all the rings were in use at once, the two 
small end rings being much more used than the big 
one. The individual deer passed rapidly from one 
ring to the others, but — and here is the queerest part 
of it all — I did not see a single deer, not even one of 
the fawns, cut across the big circle from one end ring 
to the other. After they were gone the rings showed 
clearly in the sand, but not a single track led across 



Hunting without a Gun 1 5 1 

any of the circles. The object of the play was simple 
enough. Aside from the fun, the young deer were 
being taught to twist and double quickly; but what 
the rules of the game were, and whether they ran in 
opposite circles to avoid getting dizzy, was more than 
I could discover, though the deer were never more 
than thirty yards away from me and I could watch 
every move clearly without my field-glasses. That 
the game and some definite way of playing it were 
well understood by the deer no one could doubt who 
watched this wonderful play for five minutes. Though 
they ran swiftly, with astonishing lightness and grace, 
there was no confusion. Every now and then one of 
the does would leap forward and head off one of her 
fawns as he headed into the big ring, when like a flash 
he would whirl in his tracks and away with a bl-r-r-t ! 
of triumph or dissatisfaction. Once a spike buck, and 
again a doe with two well-grown fawns, trotted out 
of the woods and, after watching the dizzy play for 
a moment, leaped into it as if they understood per- 
fectly what was expected. They played this game 
only for a few minutes at a time ; then they would 
scatter and move up and down the shore leisurely and 
nose the water. Soon one or two would come back, 
and in a moment the game would be . in full swing 
again, the others joining it swiftly as the little creatures 



152 A Little Brother to the Bear 

whirled about the rings, exercising every muscle and 
learning how to control their graceful bodies perfectly, 
though they had no idea that older heads had planned 
the game for them with a purpose. 

Watching them thus at their play, the meaning of a 
curious bit of deer anatomy became clear. A deer's 
shoulder is not attached to the skeleton at all ; it lies 
loosely inside the skin, with only a bit of delicate elas- 
tic tissue joining it to the muscles of the body. When 
a deer was headed suddenly and braced himself in his 
tracks, the body would lunge forward till the fore legs 
seemed hung almost in the middle of his belly. Again, 
when he kicked up his heels, they would seem to be 
supporting his neck, far forward of where they properly 
belonged. This free action of the shoulder is what 
gives the wonderful flexibility and grace to a deer's 
movements, just as it takes and softens all the shock 
of falling in his high-jumping run among the rocks and 
over the endless windfalls of the wilderness. 

In the midst of the play, and after I had watched it 
for a full half-hour, there was a swift rustle in the 
woods on my right, and I caught my breath sharply 
at sight of a magnificent buck standing half hid 
in the underbrush. There were two or three big 
bucks with splendid antlers that lived lazily on the 
slopes above this part of the lake, and that I had been 



Hunting without a Gun 153 

watching and following for several weeks. Unlike 
the does and fawns and young bucks, they were wild 
as hawks and selfish as cats. They rarely showed 
themselves in the open, and if surprised there with 
other deer they bounded away at the first sight or sniff 
of danger. Does and little fawns, when they saw you, 
would instantly stamp and whistle to warn the other 
deer before they had taken the first step to save them- 
selves or investigate the danger; but the big bucks 
would bound or glide away, according to the method 
of your approach, and in saving their own skins, as 
they thought, would have absolutely no concern for 
the safety of the herd feeding near by. — And that is 
one reason why, in a natural state, deer rarely allow 
the bucks and bulls to lead them. 

The summer laziness was still upon these big bucks ; 
the wild fall running had not yet seized them. Once 
I saw a curious and canny bit of their laziness. I had 
gone off with a guide to try the trout at a distant lake. 
While I watched a porcupine and tried to win his con- 
fidence with sweet chocolate — a bad shot, by the way 
— the guide went on far ahead. As he climbed a 
ridge, busy with thoughts of the dim blazed trail he 
was following, I noticed a faint stir in some bushes 
on one side, and through my glass I made out the 
head of a big buck that was watching the guide keenly 



154 ^ Little Brother to the Bear 

from his hiding. It was in the late forenoon, when 
deer are mostly resting, and the lazy buck was debat- 
ing, probably, whether it were necessary for him to 
run or not. The guide passed rapidly; then to my 
astonishment the head disappeared as the buck lay 
down where he was. 

Keeping my eyes on the spot, I followed on the 
guide's trail. There was no sign of life in the thicket 
as I passed, though beyond a doubt the wary old buck 
was watching my every motion keenly. When I had 
gone well past and still the thicket remained all quiet, 
I turned gradually and walked towards it. There was 
a slight rustle as the buck rose to his feet again. He 
had evidently planned for me to follow the steps of 
the other man, and had not thought it worth while to 
stand up. Another slow step or two on my part, then 
another rustle and a faint motion of underbrush — so 
faint that, had there been a wind blowing, my eye 
would scarcely have noticed it — told me where the 
buck had glided away silently to another covert, where 
he turned and stood to find out whether I had dis- 
covered him, or whether my change of direction had 
any other motive than the natural wandering of a man 
lost in the woods. 

That was far back on the ridges, where most of the 
big bucks loaf and hide, each one by himself, during 



Hunting without a Gun 155 

the summer. Down at the lake, however, there were 
two or three that for some reason occasionally showed 
themselves with the other deer, but were so shy and 
wild that hunting them without a gun was almost 
impossible. It was one of these big fellows that now 
stood half hid in the underbrush within twenty yards 
of me, watching the deer's game impatiently. 

A stamp of his foot and a low snort stopped the 
play instantly, and the big buck moved out on the 
shore in full view. He looked out over the lake, 
where he had so often seen the canoes of men mov- 
ing ; his nose tried the wind up shore ; eyes and ears 
searched below, where I was lying; then he scanned 
the lake again keenly. Perhaps he had seen my canoe 
upturned among the water-grasses far away ; more prob- 
ably it was the unknown sense or feel of an enemy, 
which they who hunt with or without a gun find 
so often among the larger wild animals, that made 
him restless and suspicious. While he watched and 
searched the lake and the shores not a deer stirred 
from his tracks. Some command was in the air, which 
I myself seemed to feel in my hiding. Suddenly the 
big buck turned and glided away into the woods, and 
every deer on the shore followed instantly without 
question or hesitation. Even the little fawns, never 
so heedless as to miss a signal, felt something in the 



156 A Little Brother to the Bear 

buck's attitude deeper than their play, something per- 
haps in the air that was not noticed before, and trotted 
after their mothers, fading away at last like shadows 
into the darkening woods. 

On another lake, years before, when hunting in the 
same way without a gun, I saw another curious bit of 
deer wisdom. It must be remembered that deer are 
born apparently without any fear of man. The fawns 
when found very young in the woods are generally 
full of playfulness and curiosity ; and a fawn that has 
lost its mother will turn to a man quicker than to 
any other animal. When deer see you for the first 
time, no matter how old or young they are, they 
approach cautiously, if you do not terrify them by 
sudden motions, and in twenty pretty ways try to find 
out what you are. Like most wild animals that have 
a keen sense of smell, and especially like the bear and 
caribou, they trust only their noses at first. When 
they scent man for the first time they generally run 
away, not because they know what it means but for 
precisely the opposite reason, because there is in 
the air a strong scent that they do not know, and 
that they have not been taught by their mothers how 
to meet. When in doubt run away — that is the 
rule of nose which seems to be impressed by their 
mothers upon all timid wild things, though they act 



Hunting without a Gun 157 

in almost the opposite way when sight or hearing 
is in question. 

All this is well known to hunters ; but now comes 
the curious exception. After I had been watching 
the deer for some weeks at one of their playgrounds, 
a guide came into camp with his wife and little child. 
They were on their way in to their own camp for the 
hunting season. To please the little one, who was 
fond of all animals, I took her with me to show her 
the deer playing. As they were running about on the 
shore I sent her out of our hiding, in a sudden spirit 
of curiosity, to see what the deer and fawns would do. 
True to her instructions, the little one walked out very 
slowly into the midst of them. They started at first ; 
two of the old deer circled down instantly to wind her ; 
but even after getting her scent, the suspicious man- 
scent that most of them had been taught to fear, they 
approached fearlessly, their ears set forward and their 
expressive tails down, without any of the nervous wig- 
gling that is so manifest whenever their owners catch 
the first suspicious smell in the air. The child, mean- 
while, sat on the shore, watching the pretty creatures 
with wide-eyed curiosity, but obeying my first whispered 
instructions like a little hero and keeping still as a 
hunted rabbit. Two little spotted fawns were already 
circling about her playfully, but the third went straight 



158 A Little Brother to the Bear 

up to her, stretching his nose and ears forward to show 
his friendliness, and then drawing back to stamp his 
little fore foot prettily to make the silent child move 
or speak, and perhaps also to show her in deer fashion 
that, though friendly, he was not at all afraid. 

There was one buck in the group, a three-year-old 
with promising antlers. At first he was the only deer 
that showed any fear of the little visitor ; and his fear 
seemed to me to be largely a matter of suspicion, or of 
irritation that anything should take away the herd's 
attention from himself. The fall wildness was coming 
upon him, and he showed it by restless fidgeting, by 
frequent proddings of the does with his antlers, and by 
driving them about roughly and unreasonably. Now 
he approached the child with a shake of his antlers, 
not to threaten her, it seemed to me, but rather to 
show the other deer that he was still master, the Great 
Mogul who must be consulted upon all occasions. For 
the first time the little girl started nervously at the 
threatening motion. I called softly to her to keep still 
and not be afraid, at the same time rising up quietly 
from my hiding-place. Instantly the little comedy 
changed as the deer whirled in my direction. They 
had seen men before and knew what it meant. The 
white flags flew up over the startled backs, and the 
air fairly bristled with whistling h-e-e-e-yeu, hc-us as 



Hunting without a Gun 159 

deer and fawns rose over the nearest windfalls like a 
flock of frightened partridges and plunged away into 
the shelter of the friendly woods. 

There are those who claim that the life of an animal 
is a mere matter of blind instinct and habit. Here on 
the shore before my eyes was a scene that requires a 
somewhat different explanation. 

Though deer are the most numerous and the most 
interesting animals to be hunted without a gun, they 
are by no means the only game to fill the hunter's heart 
full and make him glad that his game bag is empty. 
Moose are to be found on the same waters, and in the 
summer season, if approached very slowly and quietly, 
especially in a canoe, they show little fear of man. Last 
summer, as I stole down the thoroughfare into Mata- 
gammon, a cow moose and her calf loomed up before 
me in the narrow stream. I watched her awhile 
silently, noting her curious way of feeding, — now 
pulling up a bite of lush water-grass, now stretching 
her neck and her great muffle to sweep off a mouthful 
of water-maple leaves, first one then the other, like a 
boy with two apples; while the calf nosed along the 
shore and paid no attention to the canoe, which he saw 
perfectly but which his mother did not see. After 
watching them a few minutes I edged across to the 



160 A Little Brother to the Bear 

opposite bank and drifted down to see if it were pos- 
sible to pass without disturbing them. The calf was 
busy with something on the bank, the mother deep in 
the water-grass as I drifted by, sitting low in the canoe. 
She saw me when abreast of her, and after watching 
me a moment in astonishment turned again to her 
feeding. Then I turned the canoe slowly and lay to 
leeward of them, within ten yards, watching every sig- 
nificant motion. The calf was nearer to me now, and 
the mother by a silent command brought him back 
and put him on the side away from me ; but the little 
fellow's curiosity was aroused by the prohibition, and 
he kept peeking under his mother's belly, or twisting 
his head around over her hocks, to see who I was and 
what I was doing. But there was no fear manifest, 
and I backed away slowly at last and left them feeding 
just where I had found them. 

In curious contrast was the next meeting. It was 
on the little beaver stream below Hay Lake, a spot 
as wild as any dream of Dore, and a famous feeding- 
ground for moose and deer. I was fishing for trout 
when a mother moose came up-stream among the 
bilberry and alder bushes. I had stopped casting and 
sat low in my canoe, and she did not see me until 
abreast of me, within twenty feet. Then she swung 
her huge head carelessly in my direction, and went on 



Hunting without a Gun 161 

as if I were of no more account than one of the beaver 
houses on the shore. Ten steps behind her came a 
calf. The leaves had scarcely closed on her flanks 
when he put his head out of the bushes and came 
plump upon me. With a squeal and a jump like a 
startled deer he plunged away through the bushes, 
and I heard the mother swing round in a crashing 
circle to find him and to know what had frightened 
him. Ten minutes later, as I sat very still* in the 
same spot, a huge head was thrust out of the bushes 
where the calf had disappeared. Below it, pressing 
close against his mother's side, was the" head of the 
little one, looking out again at the thing that had 
frightened him. He had brought her back to see, 
and was now plainly asking What is it, mother ? what 
is it? though there was never a sound uttered. And 
there they stayed for a full minute, while none of us 
moved a muscle, before they drew back silently and 
disappeared, leaving only a double line of waving, 
quivering bush tops, like the trail of a huge snake, to 
tell me where they had gone. 

On the same stream I got the famous bull of the 
expedition. I was paddling along silently when I 
turned a bend, and a huge dark bulk loomed suddenly 
dead ahead of the canoe. In front of the moose two 
great antlers, the biggest I ever saw in Maine, reached 



1 62 A Little Brother to the Bear 

up and out of the water. The rest of his head was 
below the surface, groping for lily roots, and my first 
exultant thought was that one might drive the canoe 
between the tips of those great antlers without touch- 
ing them, so big and wide were they. Instead I sent 
the canoe swiftly forward till his head began to come 
up, when I crouched low and watched him, so near 
that every changing expression of his huge face and 
keen little eyes was seen perfectly without my glasses. 
He saw me instantly and dropped the root he had 
pulled up, and his lower jaw remained hanging in his 
intense wonder. Not so much who I was, but how 
on earth I got there so silently, seemed to be the cause 
of his wonder. He took a slow step or two in my 
direction, his ears set forward stiffly and his eyes 
shining as he watched me keenly for the slightest 
motion. Then he waded out leisurely, climbed the 
bank, which was here steep, and disappeared in the 
woods. As he vanished I followed him, close behind, 
and watched his way of carrying his huge antlers and 
lifting his legs with a high step, like a Shanghai 
rooster, over the windfalls. Of all the moose that I 
have ever followed, this was the only one whose head 
seemed too heavy for comfort. He carried it low, 
and nursed his wide antlers tenderly among the tree 
trunks and alder stems. They were still in the velvet. 




' Lunged away at a 
terrific pace " 



Hunting without a Gun 163 

and no doubt the rude scraping of the rough branches 
made him wince unless he went softly. At last, find- 
ing that I was close at his heels, he turned for another 
look at me ; but I slipped behind a friendly tree until I 
heard him move on, when I followed him again. Some 
suspicion of the thing that was on his trail, or it may 
be some faint eddy of air with the danger smell in it, 
reached him then; he laid his great antlers back on 
his shoulders, moose fashion, and lunged away at a 
terrific pace through the woods. I could fancy his 
teeth gritting and his eyes at squint as some snapping 
branch whacked his sensitive antlers and made him 
grunt with the pain of it. But the fear behind was 
all-compelling, and in a moment I had lost him in the 
shadow and silence of the big woods. 

It was that same night, I think, that I had another 
bit of this good hunting, which fills one's soul with 
peace and gives him a curious sense of understanding 
the thoughts and motives of the Wood Folk. I was 
gliding along in my canoe in the late twilight over 
still water, in the shadow of the wild high meadow- 
grass, when a low quacking and talking of wild ducks 
came to my ears. I pushed the canoe silently into 
the first open bogan in the direction of the sounds, 
till I was so near that I dared not go another foot, 
when I rose up cautiously and peered over the grass 



164 A Little Brother to the Bear 

tops. There were perhaps thirty or forty of the splen- 
did birds — four or five broods, at least, and each brood 
led by its careful mother — that had just left the little 
ponds in which they were born and reared and were 
now flocking for the first time in the big lake. 

For two or three days past I had noticed the young 
broods flying about, exercising their wings in prepara- 
tion for the long autumn flights. Now they were all 
gathered on a dry mud-flat surrounded by tall grass, 
playing together and evidently getting acquainted. 
In the middle of the flat were two or three tussocks 
on which the grass had been trampled and torn down. 
There was always a duck on each of these tussocks, 
and below him were four or five more that were plainly 
trying to get up ; but the top was small and had room 
for but one, and there was a deal of quacking and 
good-natured scrambling for the place of vantage. It 
was a game, plainly enough, for while the birds below 
were trying to get up the little fellow on top was 
doing his best to keep them down. Other birds 
scampered in pairs from one side of the flat to the 
other; and there was one curious procession, or race, 
— five or six birds that started abreast and very slowly, 
and ended with a rush and a headlong dive into the 
grasses of the opposite shore. Here and there about 
the edges of the playground an old mother bird sat 



Hunting without a Gun 165 

on a tussock and looked down on the wild uncon- 
scious play, wiggling her tail in satisfaction and anon 
stretching her neck to look and listen watchfully. 
The voices of the playing birds were curiously low 
and subdued, reminding me strongly of some Indian 
children that I had once seen playing. At times the 
quacking had a faint ventriloquous effect, seeming to 
come from far away, and again it ceased absolutely 
at a sign from some watchful mother, though the play 
went steadily on, as if even in their play they must 
be mindful of the enemies that were watching and 
listening everywhere to catch them. 

As I rose a bit higher to see some birds that were 
very near me but screened by the meadow-grass, my 
foot touched a paddle and rattled it slightly. A single 
quack, different from all others, followed instantly, 
and every bird stopped just where he was and stretched 
his neck high to listen. One mother bird saw me, 
though I could not tell which one it was until she 
slipped down from her bog and waddled bravely across 
in my direction. Then a curious thing happened, 
which I have often seen and wondered at among gre- 
garious birds and animals. A signal was given, but 
without any sound that my ears could detect in the 
intense twilight stillness. It was as if a sudden impulse 
had been sent out like an electric shock to every bird 



1 66 A Little Brother to the Bear 

in the large flock. At the same instant every duck 
crouched and sprang ; the wings struck down sharply ; 
the flock rose together, as if flung up from a pigeon 
trap, and disappeared with a rush of wings and a 
hoarse tumult of quacking that told every creature 
on the great marsh that danger was afoot. Wings 
flapped loudly here and there ; bitterns squawked ; 
herons croaked ; a spike buck whistled and jumped 
close at hand ; a passing musquash went down with a 
slap of his tail and a plunge like a falling rock. Then 
silence settled over the marsh again, and there was not 
a sound to tell what Wood Folk were abroad in the still 
night, nor what business or pleasure occupied them. 

Formerly caribou might be found on these same 
waterways, and they are the most curious and interest- 
ing game that can be hunted without a gun ; but years 
ago a grub destroyed all the larches on which the 
wandering woodland caribou depend largely for food. 
The deer, which are already as many as the country 
can support in winter, take care of the rest of the good 
browse, so that there was nothing left for the caribou 
but to cross over the line into New Brunswick, where 
larches are plenty and where there is an abundance of 
the barren moss that can be dug up out of the snow. 
Better still, if one is after caribou, is the great wilder- 
ness of northern Newfoundland, where the caribou 



Hunting without a Gun 167 

spend the summer and where from a mountain top 
one may count hundreds of the splendid animals scat- 
tered over the country below in every direction. And 
hunting them so, with the object of finding out the 
secrets of their curious lives, — why, for instance, each 
herd often chooses its own burying-ground, or why a 
bull caribou loves to pound a hollow stump for hours 
at a time, — this is, to my mind, infinitely better sport 
than the hunt for a head, where one waylays them on 
their paths of migration, the paths that have been 
sacred for untold generations, and shoots them down 
as they pass like tame cattle. 

To the hunter without a gun there is no close sea- 
son on any game, and a doe and her fawns are better 
hunting than a ten-point buck. By land or water he 
is always ready ; there are no labors for effects, except 
what he chooses to impose upon himself; no dis- 
appointments are possible, for whether his game be 
still or on the jump, shy as a wilderness raven or full 
of curiosity as a blue jay, he always finds something to 
stow away in his heart in the place where he keeps 
things that he loves to remember. All is fish that 
comes into his net, and everything is game that catches 
the glance of his eye in earth or air or water. Now it 
is the water-spiders — skaters the boys call them — 
that play a curious game among the grass stems, and 



1 68 A Little Brother to the Bear 

that have more wonderful habits than the common 
balloon spiders, which sometimes turned Jonathan 
Edwards' thoughts from the stern, unlovable God of 
his theology to the patient, care-taking Servant of the 
universe that some call Force, and others Law, and 
that one who knew Him called The Father, alike 
among the lilies of the field and in the cities of men. 
Now it is an otter and her cubs playing on the surface, 
that sink when they see you and suddenly come 
up near your canoe, like a log shot up on end, and 
with half their bodies out of water to see better say 
w-h-e-e-e-yew ! like a baby seal, to express their wonder 
at such a queer thing in the lake. Now it is a mother 
loon, taking her young on her back as they leave the 
eggs and carrying them around the lake awhile, to dry 
them thoroughly in the sun before she dives from under 
them and wets them for the first time; and you must 
follow a long while before you find out why. Now it 
is a bear and her cubs — I watched three of them for 
an hour or more, one afternoon, as they gathered blue- 
berries. At first they champed them from the bushes, 
stems, leaves and all, just as they grew. Again, when 
they found a good bush, a little one with lots of ber- 
ries, they would bite it off close to the ground, or tear 
it up by the roots, and then taking it by the stem with 
both paws would pull it through their mouths from 



Hunting without a Gun 169 

one side to the other, stripping off every berry and 
throwing the useless bush away. Again they would 
strike the bushes with their paws, knocking off a 
shower of the ripest berries, and then scrape them all 
together very carefully into a pile and gobble them 
down at a single mouthful. And whenever, in wan- 
dering about after a good bush, one of the cubs spied 
the other busy at an unusually good find, it gave one 
a curious remembrance of his own boyhood to see the 
little fellow rush up whimpering to get his share 
before all the bushes should be stripped clean. 

That was good hunting. It made one glad to let 
even this rare prowler of the woods go in peace. And 
that suggests the very best thing that can be said for 
the hunter without a gun : " The wilderness and the 
solitary place shall be glad for him," for something of 
the gentle spirit of Saint Francis comes with him, and 
when he goes he leaves no pain nor death nor fear of 
man behind him. 




L N old Indian, whom I know well, 
once caught a bear in his deadfall. 
That same day the bear's mate came 
and tried to lift away the heavily 
weighted log that had fallen on her back and crushed 
her. Failing in this, he broke his way into the inclo- 
sure; and when the Indian came, drawn in on silent, 
inquisitive feet by a curious low sound in the air, the 
bear was sitting beside his dead mate, holding her 
head in his arms, rocking it to and fro, moaning. — 

Two things must be done by the modern nature 
writer who would first understand the animal world 
and then share his discovery with others. He must 
collect his facts, at first hand if possible, and then he 
must interpret the facts as they appeal to his own 
head and heart in the light of all the circumstances 
that surround them. The child will be content with 
his animal story, but the man will surely ask the why 



The Point of View 1 7 1 

and the how of every fact of animal life that particu- 
larly appeals to him. For every fact is also a revela- 
tion, and is chiefly interesting, not for itself, but for 
the law or the life which lies behind it and which it in 
some way expresses. An apple falling to the ground 
was a common enough fact, — so common that it had 
no interest, until some one thought about it and found 
the great law that grips alike the falling apple and the 
falling star. 

It is so in the animal world. The common facts of 
color, size, and habit were seen for centuries, but had 
little meaning or interest until some one thought about 
them and gave us the law of species. For most birds 
and animals these common facts and their meaning 
are now well known, and it is a wearisome and thank- 
less task to go over them again. The origin of species 
and the law of gravitation are now put in the same 
comfortable category with the steam engine and the 
telegraph wire, and other things that we think we 
understand. Meanwhile the air has unseen currents 
that are ready to bear our messages, and the sun 
wastes enough energy on our unresponsive planet 
daily to make all our engine fires unnecessary, if we 
but understood. Meanwhile, in the animal world, an 
immense array of new facts are hidden away, or are 
slowly coming to light as nature students follow the 



172 A Little Brother to the Bear 

wild things in their native haunts and find how widely 
they differ one from another of the same kind, and how 
far they transcend the printed lists of habits that are 
supposed to belong to them. 

We were too long content with the ugly telegraph 
pole and wire as the limit of perfection in communica- 
tion; and we have been too well satisfied with the 
assumption that animals are governed by some queer, 
unknown thing called instinct, and that all are alike 
that belong to the same class. That is true only out- 
wardly. It is enough to give the animal a specific 
name, but no more ; and an animal's name or species 
is not the chief thing about him. You are not through 
with Indians when you have determined their race and 
tribe. That is sufficient for ethnology, to write in a 
book ; possibly also the Calvinistic theologian was one 
time satisfied therewith; but the Indian's life still 
remains, more important than his race, and only after 
two centuries of neglect, or persecution, or injustice, 
are we awaking to the fact that his life is one of ex- 
traordinary human interest. His medicine lore and 
his thoughts of God lie deeper than the curve of 
his cranium; his legends and his rude music must 
be interpreted, as well as the color of his skin; and 
we are but just beginning to see the meaning of these 
larger things. 



The Point of View 173 

All this is only an analogy and proves nothing. 
However, it may suggest, if one thinks about it, that 
possibly we have made a slightly similar mistake about 
the animals ; that we are not quite through with them 
when we have cried instinct and named their species, 
nor altogether justified in killing them industriously 
off the face of the earth — as we once did with the 
poor Beothuk Indians, for the rich furs that they wore. 
Beneath their fur and feathers is their life ; and a few 
observers are learning that their life also, with its faint 
suggestion of our own primeval childhood, is one of 
intense human interest. Some of them plan and calcu- 
late ; and mathematics, however elementary, is hardly a 
matter of instinct. Some of them build dams and canals; 
some have definite social regulations ; some rescue com- 
rades in distress; some bind their own wounds, and 
even set a broken leg in a clay cast, which is made more* 
adhesive by being mixed with fibers or feathers. All 
higher orders communicate more or less with each 
other, and train their young, and modify their habits 
to meet changing conditions. These things, and many 
more quite as wonderful, are also facts. We are still 
waiting for the naturalist who will tell us truly what 
they mean. 

I have had these two things — the new facts and the 
interpretation thereof — in mind in putting together 



174 A Little Brother to the Bear 

these sketches from my note-books and wilderness 
records. The facts have been carefully selected 
from many years' observations, with a view of empha- 
sizing some of the unusual or unknown things of the 
animal world. Indeed, in all my work, or rather play, 
out of doors, I have tried to discover the unusual 
things, the things that mark an animal's individuality, 
leaving the work of general habits and specific classi- 
fication to other naturalists who know more and can 
do it better. Therefore have I passed over a hundred 
animals or birds to watch one, and have recorded only 
the rare observations, such as are seldom seen, and 
then only by men who spend long days and seasons in 
the woods in silent watchfulness. 

Whether these rare habits are common property 
among the species, and seem strange to us only be- 
* cause we know so very little of the hidden life of wild 
animals, or whether they are the discovery of a few 
rare individuals better endowed by nature than their 
fellows, I must leave to the reader to determine ; for 
I do not know. This determination, however, must 
come not by theory or prejudice or a priori reasoning, 
but simply by watching the animals more closely when 
they are unconscious of man's presence and so express 
themselves naturally. As a possible index in the 
matter, I might suggest that I have rarely made an 



The Point of View 175 

observation, however incredible it seemed to me at the 
time, without sooner or later finding some Indian or 
trapper or naturalist who had seen a similar thing 
among the wild creatures. The woodcock genius, 
whose story is recorded here, is a case in point. So is 
the porcupine that rolled down a long hill, for the fun 
of the thing apparently — an observation that has been 
twice confirmed, once by a New Brunswick poacher 
and again by a Harvard instructor. So also are the 
wildcat that stole my net, and the heron that chummed 
little fish by a bait, and the fox that played possum 
when caught in a coop, and the kingfishers that stocked 
a pool with minnows for their little ones to catch, and 
the toad that learned to sit on a cow's hoof and wait 
for the flies at milking time. All these, and a score 
more of incredible things, seen by different observers 
in different places, would seem to indicate that intelli- 
gence is more widely spread among the Wood Folk 
than we had supposed ; and that, when we have 
opened our eyes wider and cast aside our prejudices, 
we shall learn that Nature is generous, even to the 
little folk, with her gifts and graces. 

As for the interpretation of the facts, upon which I 
have occasionally ventured, — that is wholly my own, 
and is of small consequence beside the other. Its 
value is a purely personal one, and I have recorded it 



176 A Little Brother to the Bear 

rather to set the reader thinking for himself than to 
answer his questions. In the heart of every man will 
be found the measure of his world, whether it be small 
or great. He will judge heat, not by mathematical 
computation of the sun's energy, but by the twitch of 
his burned finger, as every other child does ; and com- 
prehend the law of reaction, not from Ganot's treatise, 
but by pulling on his own boot-straps. So, with all 
the new facts of animal life before him, he will still 
live in a blind world and understand nothing until he 
have the courage to look in his own heart and read. 



GLOSSARY OF INDIAN NAMES 



Cheokhes, che-ok-hes', the mink. 

Cheplahgan, chefi-ldh'gan, the bald eagle. 

Ch'geegee-lokh-sis, ch" 1 gee-gee' lock-sis, the chickadee. 

Chigwooltz, chig-wooltz' , the bullfrog. 

Cldte Scarpe, a legendary hero, like Hiawatha, of the Northern Indians. 

Pronounced variously, Clote Scarpe, Groscap, Gluscap, etc. 
Commoosie, co77i-moo-sie' ', a little shelter, or hut, of boughs and bark. 
Deedeeaskh, dee-dee' ask, the blue jay. 
Eleemos, el-ee'mos, the fox. 
Hawahak, hd-wd-hdk' , the hawk. 

Hukweem, hnk-wee7>i ', the great northern diver, or loon. 
Ismaques, iss-ma-qties' ' , the fish-hawk. 
Kagax, kdg'dx, the weasel. 
Kakagos, kd-kd-gos', the raven. 
K'dunk, ft 1 dunk', the toad. 
Keeokuskh, kee-o-kusk' ', the muskrat. 
Keeonekh, kee'o-7iek, the otter. 
Killooleet, kil' loo-leet, the white -throated sparrow. 
Kookooskoos, koo-koo-skoos', the great horned owl. 
Koskomenos, kos' ko77i-e-7ios', the kingfisher. 
Kupkawis, cup-kq'wis, the barred owl. 
Kwaseekho, kwd-seek'ho, the sheldrake. 
Lhoks, locks, the panther. 
Malsun, 7/idl'sun, the wolf. 
Meeko, 7iieek'o, the red squirrel. 
Megaleep, 7neg'd-leep, the caribou. 

Milicete, 7iiil'l-cete, the name of an Indian tribe ; written also Malicete. 
Mitches, mifckis, the birch partridge, or ruffed grouse. 

i?7 



178 A Little Brother to the Bear 

Moktaques, viok-ta'ques, the hare. 

Moo ween, 7noo.-ween', the black bear. 

Mooweesuk, moo-wee' suk, the coon. 

Musquash, mus' quash, the muskrat. 

Nemox, nem'ox, the fisher. 

Pekompf , pe kompf, the wildcat. 

Pekquam, pek-wam' ', the fisher. 

Quoskh, quoskh, the blue heron. 

Seksagadagee, sek'sa-ga-da'gee, the Canada grouse, or spruce 

partridge. 
Skooktum, shook' turn, the trout. 
Tookhees, tok'hees, the woodmouse. 
Umquenawis, um-que-n&'wiS) the moose. 
Unk Wunk, uuk' wunk, the porcupine. 
Upweekis, tip-week' is s, the Canada lynx. 
Whitooweek, whit-oo-week\ the woodcock. 



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Hodge's Nature Study and Life 1.50 1.65 

Holden's The Sciences 50 .60 

Newell's Outlines of Lessons in Botany : 

Part I. From Seed to Leaf 50 .55 

Part II. Flower and Fruit 80 -.90 

Newell's Reader in Botany: 

Part I. From Seed to Leaf 60 .70 

Part II. Flower and Fruit 60 .70 

Roth's First Book of Forestry 75 .85 

Shaler's Story of Our Continent 75 .S$ 

Weed's Seed-Travellers 25 .30 

Weed's Stories of Insect Life: 

First Series 25 .30 

Second Series. (Murtfeldt and Weed) 30 .35 



GINN & COMPANY Publishers 



DEC 6 1904 



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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




III II Ml II I 
007 000 288 7 » 






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